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THE KU KLUX KLAN: 
A Study of the American Mind 


BY 


JOHN MOFFATT MECKLIN, Fh.D. 


PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE 
AUTHOR OF “AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL ETHICS,” 
“DEMOCRACY AND RACE FRICTION” 


Humanas actiones Deque ridere, Deque flere, 
nec detestari, sed intelligere. 


Spinoza. 



NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
1924 







» 


COPYRIGHT, 1924 , BY 
KAP.COUST, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 


PRINTED IM THE U. 3. A BY 
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY 
RAHWAY. N. J 

1 '* 1924 V 

©C1A778414 






To 

PRESIDENT HOPKINS and the DARTMOUTH ALUMNI 


WHOSE FRIENDLY AID DID MUCH 
TO MAKE THIS STUDY 
POSSIBLE 

a ••• * •-’ 






♦ 

















CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Rise of the Invisible Empire . . 3 

II The Rise of the Invisible Empire ( Con¬ 
tinued) .31 

III The Spiadow of the Past .... 53 

IV Concerning Klan Psychology ... 95 

V The Klan and Nativism. 127 

VI The Klan and Anti-Catholicism . . . 157- 

VII Secrecy and Citizenship .... 207 

Index. 241 






























































































THE KU KLTJX KLAN 












CHAPTER I 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 

In 1873 the Ku Klnx Klan, outside the South, was 
a synonym for the most sinister and dangerous 
forces in American life. In the North it was as¬ 
sociated with clandestine murder and masked re¬ 
bellion. Who then would have dared to prophesy 
that within less than half a century this secret, 
oath-bound order would be revived and spread to 
every section of the country? Such, however, is 
the fact. I The modern Klan was organized by Wil¬ 
liam J. Simmons in 1915, enjoyed a precarious 
existence for several years, suddenly assumed 
proportions of national importance in 1920, sur¬ 
vived the attack of the powerful New York World 
and a searching investigation by a committee of 
Congress, and to-day boasts of a following that is 
numbered in hundreds of thousands, perhaps mil¬ 
lions. The rise of the modern Klan is the most 
spectacular of all the social movements in Ameri¬ 
can society since the close of the World War. It 

3 


4 


THE KU IvLUX KLAN 


is the object of this and the following chapter to 
state briefly the main facts in the revival of the 
so-called “Invisible Empire” of the Knights of 
the Ku Klux Klan. 


i 

Colonel William Joseph Simmons, the founder 
of the modern Klan, tells ns that for twenty years 
he had given thought to the creation of an order 
standing for a comprehensive Americanism that 
would blot out Mason and Dixon’s Line. Fasci¬ 
nated as he was from boyhood by the romantic 
story of the old Klan of Reconstruction days, 
which is looked upon in the South as the savior 
of Southern civilization, he called the new order 
the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. On October 
16,1915, Mr. Simmons, together with some thirty- 
four friends, three of whom were bona fide mem¬ 
bers of the old Klan, met and signed a petition 
for a charter. The charter was granted and on 
Thanksgiving night, 1915, they gathered “under 
a blazing, fiery torch” on the top of Stone Moun¬ 
tain, near Atlanta, and took the oath of alle¬ 
giance to the Invisible Empire, Knights of the 
Ku Klux Klan. “And thus,” says Simmons in his 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 5 


characteristic high-flown language, ‘ * on the moun¬ 
tain top that night at the midnight hour, while men 
braved the surging blasts of wild wintry winds and 
endured a temperature far below freezing [a 
World reporter was unkind enough to consult the 
weather bureau record for that night and found 
the minimum temperature to be only forty-five 
degrees], bathed in the sacred glow of the fiery 
cross, the Invisible Empire was called from its 
slumber of half a century to take up a new task 
and fulfil a new mission for humanity’s good and 
to call back to mortal habitation the good angel 
of practical fraternity among men” (The ABC 
of the Ku Klux Klan, Ku Klux Klan Press, 
Atlanta, Georgia). 

For five years the Klan seems to have passed 
an uneventful existence, spreading very slowly 
and making no great impression upon the country. 
By the early fall of 1918 it was organized in lo¬ 
calities of the South, especially in Alabama and 
Georgia, the usual manifestation of its presence 
being the posting of warnings as in the Recon¬ 
struction days. In Mobile, Alabama, where a 
strike was threatened in the government ship¬ 
yards, masked men leaped from their cars clad in 
the Klan regalia and forced the driver of a patrol 


6 THE KU IvLUX KLAN 

wagon to surrender the strike leader who was 
then spirited away. In all these earlier appear¬ 
ances the Klan directed its activities against alien 
enemies and those accused of being disloyal, the 
idlers and slackers, strike leaders, and immoral 
women. Public sentiment, as in the case of the 
Mobile incident, seems to have supported the 
Klansmen, doubtless because most of them repre¬ 
sented the better element of the communities. 
There were sporadic references to the Klan dur¬ 
ing 1919 and the first half of 1920. But by the 
fall of 1920 the Klan showed a decided increase 
in its activities. Rumors arose that the Klan was 
gaining a foothold in the North. The National 
Association for the Advancement of Colored Peo¬ 
ple sought to check its spread by asking Post¬ 
master General Burleson to forbid the Klan the 
use of the mails. The Klan had, indeed, gained a 
foothold in New York though its movements were 
much hampered by the opposition of the police. 

n 

The rapid expansion of the order was due to a 
radical change in its organization in June, 1920. 
Imperial Wizard Simmons had proven himself to 
be a capable “ spellbinder” but an impractical 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 7 


dreamer with little organizing ability. His so¬ 
ciety was in financial straits. At most it num¬ 
bered only four or five thousand members and 
was doomed to go the way, apparently, of count¬ 
less other organizations of a similar nature. At 
this juncture Mr. Edward Young Clarke and Mrs. 
Elizabeth Tyler came to the aid of Wizard Sim¬ 
mons and his struggling society and rescued it 
from oblivion. They had been associated for 
years in connection with the Southern Publicity 
Association and had been successful in drives for 
funds for such organizations as the Anti-Saloon 
League, the Roosevelt Memorial Fund, the Near- 
East Relief, and similar movements. They lis¬ 
tened to the schemes of Simmons and thought 
they saw in the Klan financial possibilities. A 
contract was entered into by which Clarke became 
head of the propaganda department with com¬ 
plete charge of organization. Aided by Mrs. 
Tyler, whose gifts as an organizer and promoter 
he asserted were second only to his own, they pro¬ 
ceeded to “sell” the Klan to the American pub¬ 
lic. 

Within a little over a year, that is, in the period 
between June, 1920, when the contract was en¬ 
tered upon, and October, 1921, when the Klan was 
investigated by Congress, the Klan had grown 


8 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


from a few thousand to something like 100,000 
members. Clarke, aided by Mrs. Tyler, had ap¬ 
plied to Klan promotion the skill acquired 
through long experience. The country was di¬ 
vided into some eight or more “ domains, ” or 
geographical areas, such as Southeast, Southwest, 
Northeast, the Mississippi Valley, the Pacific 
Coast. Each 4 4 domain' 9 was divided into 
“realms,” or states. The head of the promotion 
department as a whole was Imperial Kleagle 
E. Y. Clarke. The head of the “domain” was 
called a Grand Goblin. The head of the 44 realm , 9 9 
or state, was called a King Kleagle, and the house- 
to-house solicitors, or legwork men, were called 
Kleagles. There can be little doubt that the 
purely commercial motive had much to do with ; 
the successful promotion of the Klan. The mem-1 
bership fee was ten dollars, which was divided j 
as follows: four of the ten dollars went to the. 
Kleagle, or local solicitor, when he signed up a 
new member; one dollar went into the pocket of 
the King Kleagle, or state sales-manager; the 
Grand Goblin, or district salesman, had to be con¬ 
tent with only fifty cents, while the remaining 
four dollars and fifty cents went to Atlanta. It 
will be seen that the inducement to the solicitor 
was liberal. The purely commercial element has, 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 9 

however, been overemphasized. It plays a part 
naturally and inevitably in every such system of 
promotion. But it must not be forgotten that the 
commercial motive alone can never explain the 
marvellous spread of the Klan. 

This period of remarkable expansion was ac- - 
companied by a wave of lawlessness and crime 
which, rightly or wrongly, was associated with the 
Ku Klux Klan. From October, 1920, to October, 
1921, the New York World reported four killings, 
one mutilation, one branding with acid, forty-one 
floggings, twenty-seven tar and feather parties, 
five kidnappings, forty-three individuals warned 
to leave town or otherwise threatened, fourteen 
communities threatened by posters, sixteen pa¬ 
rades of masked men with warning placards. 
These outbreaks were characterized, generally, 
by two peculiarities. They were “punishments’’ 
administered to individuals because of alleged 
violation of statute law or of the demands of good 
morals and they were committed after nightfall 
by parties whose identity was concealed by masks.. 
The name of the Ku Klux Klan was very generally" 
associated by the public with these outrages. The 
New York World and many other papers asserted 
that for all these outrages the Klan was either 
directly or indirectly responsible. Emperor Sim- 


10 


TKE KU KLUX KLAN 


mons as emphatically denied that the official Klan 
had anything to do with them. What is of more 
immediate concern to ns in this connection is that 
these outrages were directly responsible for the 
exposure by the New York World and the Congres¬ 
sional investigation of October, 1921. 

m 

The investigation of the New York World, in 
view of the strict secrecy of the Klan and the fact 
that the investigators did not have power of sub¬ 
poena and were forced to deal with rumor and 
voluntary information, is little short of a master¬ 
piece of newspaper efficiency. It indicates con¬ 
vincingly that it is impossible for any organiza¬ 
tion claiming to be secret and yet dealing with 
matters of public import to conceal its inner 
workings from the public. There is no doubt that 
these World investigators were better posted as 
to the work of the Klan than were individual 
Klansmen themselves. It is probable, also, that 
the government secret service accumulated in¬ 
formation fully as complete as that of the World 
and is well posted on the activities of the Klan. 
These facts should put a crimp in the self- 
confidence of any organization attempting to 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 11 


defy public opinion and operate in the dark. It 
should convince secret orders of every variety 
that in a free country secrecy is tolerated not be¬ 
cause the public cannot help itself but because the 
authorities of the state look upon such secrecy as 
harmless. In no other nation in the world is pub¬ 
lic curiosity keener or the machinery for gratify¬ 
ing that curiosity developed to such perfection. 
The moral of all this is that it is the part of wis¬ 
dom to do all things of real importance for public 
welfare openly and above board. Any other 
course must inevitably subject the order con¬ 
cerned to the humiliation of having its secrets 
aired in hostile fashion in public. The officials of 
the Klan complained bitterly that the World was 
brutally inconsiderate when it published the Klan 
ritual, held up to ridicule its bombastic rhetoric, 
its outlandish nomenclature, and its childish 
mummeries. The reply is that the Klan chal¬ 
lenged just such an exposure when it boasted of 
its impenetrable secrecy. Its hood and gown, its 
ghostly parades, its anonymous threats, its boast 
of an Invisible Empire that “sees all and hears 
all” were a direct challenge to the press to find 
out the truth. If any Klansmen of finer sensi¬ 
bilities, and there are many such, were mortified 
by the sorry figures cut by Emperor Simmons, 


12 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

Imperial Kleagle Clarke, and Mrs. Tyler when ex¬ 
posed to the light of publicity, they have only 
themselves and the policy of their order to thank 
for it. 

It was undoubtedly the conviction of the World 
that a thoroughgoing exposure of the secrets of 
the Klan and a scathing arraignment of its 
methods would suffice to discredit it with the 
American people. In its arraignment of the Klan, 
however, it is a question whether this great daily 
did not overshoot the mark and defeat its own 
ends. The World overestimated the number and 
power of the Klan, for it talked of a membership 
of 500,000, and even of 700,000, when Congres¬ 
sional investigation showed that the Klan in Oc¬ 
tober, 1921, numbered hardly more than 100,000. 
The World ascribed the success of the Klan to a 
skilful salesmanship of hate in that it resorted 
“to every ‘wrinkle’ which practical salesmanager- 
ship keeps in its box of tricks’’ to make effective 
its appeal ‘ ‘ to the ignorant, the cruel, the coward¬ 
ly, and the vengeful.’’ But to assume that the re¬ 
markable spread of the Klan was due solely or 
mainly to its appeal to base and selfish motives is 
misleading. In this vast movement, becoming 
cumbersome in its purposeless opportunism and 
swelling to hundreds of thousands during 1921 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 13 

and 1922, many elements entered. A most im¬ 
portant factor was unquestionably the system of 
salesmanship initiated by E. Y. Clarke. Even 
granting, however, that Clarke and his assistants 
were merely commercializing hates and preju¬ 
dices, it is well to remember that men joined the 
Klan because it appealed to their patriotism and 
their moral idealism more than to their hates and 
prejudices. The baser motives were present, but 
they alone can never account for the spread of the 
Klan. 

Perhaps the fundamental mistake of the news¬ 
papers is that they failed to grasp the Klan’s real 
significance. The World described the Klan as 
something alien to American life, a cancer eating 
its way into the vitals of society. The Klan is 
painted as thoroughly un-American. The Klan, 
with equal confidence, asserts that it stands for 
“one hundred percent Americanism .’’ If the 
Klan were utterly un-American it could never 
have succeeded as it has. /The Klan is not alien 
to American society. If it were, the problem 
would be much simpler. The Klan is but the re¬ 
crudescence of forces that already existed in 
American society, some of them recent, others 
dating from the more distant past.,/ It gives a 
totally false idea of the social significance of the 


14s 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


Klan, therefore, to liken it, as does the World, to 
an alien and destructive force “tunneling, mole¬ 
like, under the whole structure of American insti¬ 
tutions. ’ 1 It is the object of this study to show 
that the Klan draws its inspirations from ancient 
prejudices, classical hatreds, and ingrained social 
habits. The germs of the disease of the Klan, like 
germs in the human body, have long been present 
in the social organism and needed only the weaken¬ 
ing of the social tissue to become malignant. 

The hope that publication of the facts would kill 
the Klan has not been realized. The World’s expo¬ 
sure was published in eighteen leading dailies, in¬ 
cluding such Southern papers as the Neiv Orleans 
Times-Picayune, Houston Chronicle, Dallas News, 
Galveston News, Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer-Sun, 
and the Oklahoman . But since the World's ex¬ 
posure and the Congressional investigation the 
Klan has flourished like a green bay tree and to¬ 
day numbers hundreds of thousands^ possibly 
millions. Here is matter for reflection for every 
one interested in the workings of the American 
mind and the part played by the press in the for¬ 
mation of public sentiment. It suggests that 
something more is needed than the mere publica¬ 
tion of the facts. There is necessary, for effective 
public opinion, a critical and impartial weighing 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 15 

of those facts, an interpretation of their meaning 
which will enable men to arrive at the truth. It is 
almost impossible, it seems, for the newspaper re¬ 
porter to resist the temptation either to play the 
prosecuting attorney or to cast his facts in a 
‘‘story’’ form, thereby running the danger of per¬ 
verting their meaning. The ‘ ‘ story ’ 9 of the World 
reporters is interesting but not convincing. 
With the best of intentions the World has 
hardly given us an unbiased and critical esti¬ 
mate of the significance of the Klan. What the 
press exposure and the Congressional investiga¬ 
tion did give to the Klan was a vast amount of 
gratuitous and invaluable advertising. The moral 
of it all seems to be that there is a crying need 
for some group or some social organ which can 
take the facts presented by the press or federal 
investigators and interpret them to the masses of 
Americans. What impresses the student of the 
Klan movement at every stage is the lack, on the 
part of the average American, of any real insight 
into its significance. Not man’s innate depravity, 
not overt criminal acts, nor yet wicked attempts 
to subvert American institutions, but rather plain 
old-fashioned igporance is the real enemy of that 
huge giant, the public, who is the fumbling physi¬ 
cian of our social ills. 


16 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


IV 

There are at least three possible estimates of 
Emperor Simmons, the founder and in many ways 
the most interesting figure in the Klan movement. 
The first, and perhaps the most charitable, is that 
he is a well-meaning dreamer, impractical and in¬ 
efficient, however, in business matters, and that 
he was imposed upon by Clarke and his lieuten¬ 
ants, who sought to commercialize the Klan. A 
second and quite opposite estimate is that of Cap¬ 
tain Fry, former Kleagle of the Klan, who later 
resigned and served as one of the chief sources 
of the information of the World . (Mr. Fry has 
published this information in book form under the 
title The Modern Ku Klux Klan.) Emperor Sim¬ 
mons, according to Mr. Fry, is “ a cunning, shrewd 
adventurer, who from the start conceived the idea 
of acquiring both wealth and unlimited power 
through his secret ‘Invisible Empire.’ In all his 
public utterances, in the newspapers and before 
Congress, he has shown a shiftiness and evasive¬ 
ness clearly discernible amidst a vast mass of 
wordiness . 9 9 A third explanation is that Emperor 
Simmons started out to organize a purely fra¬ 
ternal and patriotic society. He did not make a 
success of it, and Clarke and Tyler showed him 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 17 

how to turn the trick by exploiting the hates and 
prejudices rampant in the post-war period. Sim¬ 
mons was so carried away with their immediate 
success that he sanctioned their methods tacitly, 
if not openly. Our final pronouncement upon the 
character of the man must be conditioned by some 
insight into the workings of his mind. 

To judge by the external appearance of this 
tall, thin-lipped, bespectacled Southerner with his 
rather tense and emotional expression one might 
easily classify him as a revivalist preacher or a 
political “spellbinder ’’ of the familiar Southern 
type. As a matter of fact he has been a preacher, 
a travelling salesman, a promoter of fraternal 
organizations, and a professor of Southern history 
in a Southern institution. The man reflects his 
background in thought and act, for he fairly 
exudes uncritical sentimentalism of the con¬ 
ventional type. Emperor Simmons is a dreamer, 
even a mystic, with considerable oratorical power. 
His habits of thought are those of the emotional 
preacher of limited education accustomed to ap¬ 
peal to the feelings and the imagination rather 
than to reason. He is, above all, keenly, almost 
intuitively, alert to the feelings of the average 
man. Reading his public utterances, one gets 
the impression of a man whose temperament 


13 


THE IOJ KLUX KLAN 


and training are inimical to strict intellectual 
integrity. One feels that without any con¬ 
scious departure from the truth he could very 
easily convince himself, under the pressure of the 
immediate situation, that the particular point he 
wished to make was the whole truth and nothing 
hut the truth. This is important if we are to 
understand the success of the chief evangelist of 
that tangled mass of half-truths, passionate loyal¬ 
ties, traditional prejudices, and unreasoned con¬ 
victions that go to make up the Klan gospel. 

Simmons is not a genius in any sense of the 
term. He failed signally as a practical organizer. 
Neither in his public utterances nor in the Klan 
literature that comes from his pen do we find great 
or original ideas. He does possess, however, a 
singular ability to insinuate himself into the 
sympathies of the average man of the middle class 
and to play upon his likes and dislikes. In this 
respect Simmons has served as the model for all 
Klan leaders and organizers. This is perhaps his 
most important contribution to the Klan move¬ 
ment. It was by mere chance that his Klan idea 
fell upon the fruitful soil of the troubled post-war 
period, was capitalized and “sold” by Clarke and 
Tyler, and, as it gained headway, gathered to itself 
a hodgepodge of forces racial, religious, patriotic, 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 19 

political, and moral, precipitated by the turmoil of 
war and awaiting some means of crystallization 
and direction. Emperor Simmons and his Klan 
are more or less historical accidents. 

The official Klan literature from the pen of Em¬ 
peror Simmons faithfully reflects the mental at¬ 
titudes of the group he represents. It is conven¬ 
tionally and uncritically patriotic. The ritual of 
the Klan, called the Kloran, copyrighted in 1916 
by W. J. Simmons of Atlanta, Georgia, and ac¬ 
cessible on the shelves of the Library of Congress, 
abounds in asseverations of one hundred percent 
Americanism. The ritual is not characterized by 
great beauty or dignity and is conventionally re¬ 
ligious. The orthodox tenets of Evangelicalism 
from the Blood Atonement to Verbal Inspiration 
are all there, by implication at least. A Funda¬ 
mentalist would certainly find himself thoroughly 
at home in the atmosphere of the Klan cere¬ 
monies. The writer does not find any justifica¬ 
tion, however, for the charge of the World re¬ 
porter that the Klan ritual makes a sacrilegious 
use of the rite of baptism. Three of the nine 
questions put to the Klan candidate reflect the 
ideals of the middle-class, hundred-percent Ameri¬ 
canism to which the Klan makes its appeal. The 
first question, “Are you a native-born American 


20 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

citizen ?” excludes the foreigner. The third ques¬ 
tion, “Do you believe in the tenets of the Chris¬ 
tian religion V 9 is intended to exclude the Jew, 
though it might be answered in the affirmative by 
the liberal Jew who identified the “tenets of the 
Christian religion’’ with the utterances of the 
great Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, rather than with 
the dogmas of Evangelicalism derived from John 
Calvin or Wesley. This leads one to suspect that 
the real grounds for excluding the Jew are other 
than those of creed. The fifth question, “Do you 
believe in the distinctive institutions of our civil 
government and the constitutional rights of free 
speech, free public schools, free press, and the sep¬ 
aration of church and state?” is obviously aimed 
at the Catholic. There is nothing in the Klan’s 
ritual or constitution that would subject it to criti¬ 
cism. Its official documents indicate ‘in perfectly 
clear language that the Klan originally, no mat¬ 
ter what it later became in actual practice, was 
a purely fraternal and patriotic organization, one 
of hundreds of similar secret societies in this 
country. 

v 

The Congressional investigation of October, 
1921, is in many respects the climax of the drama- 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 21 

tic evolution of the modern Ku Klux Klan. It is 
a climax in which the melodramatic, not to say the 
comic, elements far outweigh the tragic, and the 
chief actor was Emperor Simmons. He played 
his part well. The Hon. William Jennings 
Bryan, who seems to be spending his declining 
days tilting at theological windmills, is accus¬ 
tomed to set his anti-evolutionist audiences in a 
roar by crying, “You can’t make a monkey of 
me.” Emperor Simmons, an ardent follower of 
Bryan and the Fundamentalists, likewise refused 
to permit the hostile committee of Congress to 
make a monkey of him. Armed with unfailing 
good humor, an unlimited supply of spellbinding 
rhetoric, perfect self-possession, and a ready and 
specious reply to every question, Emperor Sim¬ 
mons foiled every effort of the gentlemen of the 
committee, the most of whom were distinctly hos¬ 
tile, to connect the official Klan with the various 
outrages attributed to it by the press and public. 
After a candid reading of the report of the inves¬ 
tigations of the Klan by the House Rules Com¬ 
mittee of Congress one is inclined to say “not 
proven.” No ground for federal action against 
the Klan was established. 

Inconclusive as were the results of this investi¬ 
gation, so far as either condemning or exonerating 


22 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


the Klan is concerned, they throw a most inter¬ 
esting light upon the head of the Klan and the 
relations of the official to the local Klans. To the 
question of Representative Fess, “Is the purpose 
of this order anything like that of the Invisible 
Empire in Civil War times V* Emperor Simmons 
replied without the least hesitation, “No, sir; we 
have no conditions existing now that would justify 
such a modus operandi. This is purely a fra¬ 
ternal and patriotic organization and is in no 
sense a regulative or corrective organization. ’ 9 
How Emperor Simmons reconciles this statement 
with his other public utterances and with the 
lengthy and grandiloquent first degree of the 
Kloran given to all initiates into the Klan, in 
which the old Klan is glorified and emphasis is 
laid upon the fact that the modern Klan is a con¬ 
tinuation of the Klan of Reconstruction days, it 
is difficult to decide. Simmons was doubtless not 
guilty of conscious duplicity. Before the House 
Committee he had a case to make out. He had to 
convince these gentlemen and the listening public 
that the Klan was not open to criminal prosecu¬ 
tion. He took as his text the principles laid down 
in the early literature of the Klan long before the 
“salesmen of hate,” E. Y. Clarke and Mrs. Eliza- 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 23 

beth Tyler, had inaugurated a period of unprece¬ 
dented expansion. 

With this object in view it was perfectly possible 
for a man of Simmons’s temperament to convince 
himself of the justice of his position. Officially 
the Klan was and still remains a purely fraternal 
and patriotic organization. Officially the Klan is 
opposed to profiteering in race prejudice and 
religious bigotry. Officially the Klan does not 
sanction the assumption either by individuals or 
local Klans of the role of regulators of public 
morals and the enforcement of law. Officially the 
Klan is supposed never to act in its corporate 
capacity except when assembled in its local 
Klavern. Technically the position of Emperor 
Simmons was correct. But abundant data are at 
hand which indicate that in actual practice in the 
various communities the local Klan is something 
quite different. The parades, the anonymous 
threatening letters, the whippings, the tar and 
feather parties, the political programs in states 
such as Oregon and Texas, the appearance 
of masked men in churches to make donations to 
weak-kneed preachers—these and countless other 
activities disprove the Emperor’s contention that 


24* 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


the Klan is a “ purely fraternal and patriotic 
organization. ’’ 

To the charge that the Klan is organized “for 
the purpose of assisting in the enforcement of the 
law, ’’ Emperor Simmons makes this rather amaz¬ 
ing reply: “Nothing to substantiate this charge 
has been produced, and there is no room in the 
United States for any organization organized for 
such a purpose. The law is supreme and if we 
were organized for any such absurd purpose the 
Klan would not have lived a year and could not 
have grown as it has.” If Emperor Simmons 
meant by this statement that the support of law 
and order was not repeatedly made use of by 
agents, of the Klan as an inducement to join the 
Klan and that this claim did not bring many of 
the best men of the communities to identify them¬ 
selves with the Klan, then he was grossly mis¬ 
taken. If, on the other hand, Simmons meant that 
the original purpose of the Klan, as he conceived 
it in 1915, and as he outlined its ideals in the 
early Klan literature, did not contemplate the en¬ 
forcement of law and order, then perhaps he was 
correct. It was only by persistently keeping the 
attention of the gentlemen of the committee fixed 
upon the early idealistic aims of the Klan and by 
the most careful disassociation of this idealistic 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 25 

Klan from the actual facts of local Klan activities 
that Simmons was able to turn the edge of the 
Congressional investigation. 

To the charge that he “ holds imperialistic 
powers,” Simmons naively replies that this is “an 
infant organization, and if any person on earth 
should have control of the conduct and the nour¬ 
ishing of the baby, the mother of the baby should 
have that right. Are the parents imperialistic in 
their control of the children of their own genera¬ 
tion?” This argument, while frankly not very 
flattering to the self-respecting and intelligent 
members of the order, has a certain tinge of 
homely domesticity characteristic of the man in 
his appeals to the sentiments of the average man. 
The newspapers, Simmons continues, have cruelly 
caricatured him as “a £reat Wizard, sitting away 
down there in Georgia in a million-and-a-half- 
dollar palace on an exalted throne and that 
hundreds of American citizens are bowing and 
scraping before that Wizard, and that the Wizard 
was sitting there on his throne, as the picture 
would go, with horns and a spike-headed tail, 
holding an iron rod in his hands and driving 
American citizens to do his bidding.” This 
wounds the democratic sensibilities of Emperor 
Simmons. Were such an accusation true, “We 


26 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


would,” as he remarks in another connection, 
“have tucked up our great, long, forked tail, 
folded our horns, and taken to the tall timber.” 

In his effort to convince the Committee of the 
inherent humility of his soul Emperor Simmons 
grows more intimate and says: “My disposition 
from boyhood has been tinged with a distinctive 
streak of timidity and I have never had any de¬ 
sire to rule or govern.” He never goes to meet¬ 
ings, he asserts, “without a vivid consciousness of 
my unworthiness, and my desire to be down the 
line sitting in the chairs with the other fellows.” 
We fear the Emperor does himself injustice, for 
there is certainly nothing to indicate such shrink¬ 
ing modesty in his record before the hostile and 
powerful Congressional Committee where he 
bears himself with the unruffled, good humor and 
perfect ease of a veteran. Most unpleasant of all 
to this lover of democratic simplicity is the in¬ 
sinuation that he is adopting the habits of a lux¬ 
ury-loving despot. “Only yesterday I read in the 
paper, sir, that I appeared before your honorable 
committee with a great diamond pin in my tie.” 
The Emperor hastens to disabuse the public .of 
such a monstrous misapprehension. “That is no 
diamond,” he says; “that is an imperial stone.” 

The penumbra of vagueness, that characterizes 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 27 


the thinking of Simmons and makes futile any at¬ 
tempt to give clear and final formulation to the 
Klan ideals, appears in his reply to the charge 
that the emphasis on white supremacy “is being 
taken as an indication that the organization has 
for its mission the practice of violence and injus¬ 
tice towards other races and colors.’’ Simmons’s 
reply is: “That is not so. The supremacy of the 
white man means the supremacy of the white 
man’s mind as evidenced by the achievements of 
our civilization.” The Klan’s object is “to pre¬ 
serve the dignity and achievements of the white 
race in justice, fairness, and equity toward all the 
human family.” To identify “white supremacy” 
with the “supremacy of the white man’s mind” 
is to talk a language that the average Klansman 
could not understand, and it gives to the phrase a 
twist which, to say the least, is totally foreign to 
its accepted meaning. It must be remembered, 
however, that Emperor Simmons’s immediate 
problem when asked this question before a com¬ 
mittee of Congress was to offer a definition of 
“white supremacy” that would pass muster with 
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and the 
Bill of Rights. 

In reply to the suggestion that the Klan or¬ 
ganizers were obtaining members through the cir- 


28 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


culation of anti-Catholic literature, Emperor Sim¬ 
mons states: “I will say to you in all frankness 
that there was only one instance according to my 
recollection where a Kleagle circulated or at¬ 
tempted to circulate anti-Catholic literature, and 
within less than a week, as soon as I could get at 
that man, he was forever discharged from our 
work and for that reason.” This is, in truth, an 
astonishing statement, for it is the writer’s opin¬ 
ion, based upon a perusal of Klan literature, the 
replies to numerous letters, and first-hand knowl¬ 
edge of the Klan in various sections of the coun¬ 
try, that the Klan’s anti-Catholic propaganda has 
won for it more members than anything else. To 
this statement must be added what Simmons says 
in regard to the mask: “Are we the only people 
that use a mask? If so, what about Mardi Gras 
celebrations in this country, and what about 
Hallowe’en celebrations? . . . Our mask and 
robe, I say before God, are as innocent as the 
breath of an angel.” The parades were “never 
for the purpose of intimidation.” 

Towards the close of the investigation Chair¬ 
man Campbell asked: “Has it occurred to you 
that this idealistic organization that you have 
given birth to and have fostered so long is now 
being used for mercenary purposes by very clever 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 29 


people or propagandists who know how to appeal 
to people in this community or that for member¬ 
ship ?” To this Simmons replied: ‘‘Nothing has 
come to my view that would prompt me to have 
such an opinion.” Thus was the issue made up 
between Emperor Simmons and the Committee of 
Congress. Simmons insisted that the real Klan 
was the Klan as he originally conceived it and as 
he formulated its ideals in the early Klan litera¬ 
ture. He carefully sought to divorce from the 
official Klan of which he was the head every alleged 
outrage, even in such cases as that of Beaumont, 
Texas, where the local Klan assumed responsi¬ 
bility for its acts. The veil of secrecy that sepa¬ 
rates local Klans from each other and even from 
the central Klan authorities enabled Emperor 
Simmons to make out his case, for when he in¬ 
sisted that the official Klan was not responsible 
for these local outrages the committee was forced 
to take his word. 

This brings us, then, to the ultimate question, 
What is the real Klan? Is it the Klan as de¬ 
scribed by Emperor Simmons before Congress or 
is it the local Klan active in Beaumont, Texas; 
Mer Rouge, Louisiana; Portland, Oregon? Does 
Simmons’s assertion that the Klan is “a purely 
fraternal and patriotic organization and is in no 


30 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


sense a regulative and corrective organization’ ’ 
give us the real Klan or are we to find it in the 
numerous statements in the public press telling of 
the “strong arm” methods of the Klan in its at¬ 
tempts to “clean up” the various communities 
and its strenuous efforts after political power in 
city, state, and nation? From what does the 
Klan draw its vitality! Does it owe its power to 
its loyalty to the amiable, innocuous and thor¬ 
oughly conventional ideals of the official Klan 
documents or does it secure it through a clever 
appeal to the prejudices of well-intentioned peo¬ 
ple? Does the real Klan speak through the high- 
flown rhetoric and irreproachable ethics of Sim¬ 
mons before the Committee of Congress or 
through the shrieking Klan publications, such as 
The Searchlight, Sgt. Dalton's Weekly, The Fiery 
Torch? The facts seem to indicate that the Klan 
of Emperor Simmons is a pure idealization and 
to all intents and purposes non-existent. The 
real Klan is the local organization, which, owing 
primarily to its secrecy, is a law unto itself. 


CHAPTER II 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 

( Continued) 

i 

After the Congressional investigations in Octo¬ 
ber, 1921, the Klan spread with amazing rapidity. 
The center of the Klan’s strength was not at first 
and never has been in the older South. It was in 
the great area west of the Mississippi that in¬ 
cludes northern and eastern Texas, Arkansas, 
Oklahoma, and northern Louisiana, a region which 
was singularly adapted to the spread of Klan 
ideas, that the Klan reached its first peak of suc¬ 
cess. It was early transplanted to the Pacific 
coast, finding ready followers in the Sacramento 
Valley and southern California. From California 
the Klan was introduced into Oregon where it 
soon became a factor of prime importance in the 
affairs of that state. More recently the Klan has 
met with astonishing success in the Middle West. 
It is quite possible that at present the Klan has 
in the two states of Ohio and Indiana over half a 

31 


32 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


million followers, or more than in all the south¬ 
ern states east of the Mississippi. At present 
the Klan is showing considerable activity in the 
neighborhood of New York City, which may indi¬ 
cate an attempt to storm this stronghold of all 
those things to which the Klan stands opposed. 

Any attempt to estimate the actual membership 
of a secret order of such mushroom growth as 
the Klan must of course be largely a matter of 
guess. A recent investigator puts the total mem¬ 
bership at two and one half millions. (Robert L. 
Duffus, “The Ku Klux Klan in the Middle West,” 
World’s Work, July, 1923.) This seems a rather 
liberal estimate. Rut if we include in that num¬ 
ber those who have resigned from the Klan, cases 
of which the present writer has found in every 
community where the Klan is active, members 
who are only nominally connected with the order, 
and a rather nondescript group of Klan sympa¬ 
thizers who on occasion may lend their support to 
the Klan, it is possible to place the estimate of 
the Klan following at between two and three mil¬ 
lions. This is indeed a formidable figure and were 
the Klan more closely organized and animated by 
a more definite and comprehensive program it 
might become a force to be reckoned with in na¬ 
tional life. There is, however, little danger that 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 33 

the Klan as a whole will ever be able to utilize all 
its strength in a political or social program. This 
is due to the essentially local nature of the 
Klan, its singular lack of able and statesmanlike 
leaders, its planless opportunism, and, above 
all, its dearth of great unifying and constructive 
ideals. In the language of Freudianism, the Klan 
is essentially a defense mechanism against evils 
which are often more imaginary than real. It is 
for this reason negative rather than constructive 
in its influence. 

n 

There is the greatest variety of attitudes to¬ 
wards the Klan in the various sections of the 
country and even within each state, indicating the 
chaotic condition of public sentiment with regard 
to the movement. A typical Middle Western at¬ 
titude is expressed by a citizen of Kansas City, 
Missouri: “Minority favorable among the Protes¬ 
tants. Catholics antagonistic. Dominant senti¬ 
ment probably unfavorable on the ground that the 
Klan movement is unwholesome in its secrecy 
and in arousing antagonisms. , ’ Among the rather 
phlegmatic and free-thinking German population 
of Davenport, Iowa, one finds a feeling of 
“amused tolerance. ,, In the Middle West, the 


34 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


stronghold of the A. P. A. (Ajnerican Protective 
Association) movement in the nineties, anti- 
Catholicism seems to take precedence over every¬ 
thing else. A statement from Topeka, Kansas, is 
significant: “As near as we know the foundation 
of Klanism here is- fear and suspicion of the 
Roman Catholic Church. ,, The writer, Meredith 
Nicholson, of Indianapolis, states: “In Indiana 
the movement seems to be almost wholly anti- 
Catholic.” An intelligent Klansman from Chi¬ 
cago gives as the chief sources of Klan support 
in that city “the bitter opposition to the Hearst 
newspapers and the hostility to those who stand 
for ecclesiastical autocracy and Romanistic influ¬ 
ence upon the American government and its pub¬ 
lic officials—probably more joining it for this rea¬ 
son than for any other. The open opposition of 
Catholics aiid Jews in politics is helping the move¬ 
ment to a great extent. ’’ On the other hand, the 
editor of the Chicago Defender, who belongs to a 
group whose more intelligent members have 
shown a keen appreciation of the meaning of the 
Klan movement, namely, the Negroes, probably 
describes the feeling in the large city towards the 
Klan when he says: ‘‘ The general attitude in this 
community [Chicago] is hostile because of the 
existence of a large foreign population and large 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 35 

numbers of the followers of the Roman Catholic 
faith and strong labor organizations. All these 
elements represent considerable political strength. 
Our recent Republican candidate for Mayor, ac¬ 
cused of having the support of the Ku Klux Klan 
interests, was decisively defeated by the Demo¬ 
cratic candidate whose religion is Catholic and 
who received the full support of the powerful 
Negro vote.” 

It is a great mistake to imagine that the Klan 
dominates the South. Even in states such as 
Texas, where the Klan is supposed to be strong, 
there is, in every community, an intelligent and 
influential group opposed to the Klan. A citizen 
of Houston says: “The good attained has been 
more than counterbalanced by the ill-feeling cre¬ 
ated and the many instances in which injustice* 
has been done.” A correspondent from Austin 
asserts: “The Klan is a disturbing force, causing 
animosities to supplant the ordinary civilities and 
harmony that prevailed before.” A Galveston 
editor thinks: i 1 The general attitude of the com¬ 
munity is unfavorable to the Klan. This is true 
because of the cosmopolitan nature of the popula¬ 
tion, including many foreign-born, descendants of 
foreign-born, a goodly number of Catholic and 
Jewish residents and a large percentage of native- 



36 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

born Americans who have travelled and who have 
some breadth of vision.’’ In Oklahoma, in many 
ways the paradise of the Klan, the attitude is 
“favorable among Protestants on the whole.” A 
minister of Lake Charles, southern Louisiana, thus 
described conditions there during the Mer Rouge 
murder trials: “Political and business animosi¬ 
ties are being aroused. Men talk fight. One old- 
timer said yesterday, 4 If they are going to fight 
let’s have it out now and not leave it to our chil¬ 
dren.’ He is a Catholic and an old-time gunman 
but at present a fine citizen.” 

In the older sections of the South statements 
vary from “indifferent” or even “amused toler¬ 
ance” in the settled communities of the Carolinas 
and Virginia and in Savannah, Georgia, to “favor¬ 
able” and “good-naturedly tolerant” in communi¬ 
ties such as Atlanta and Birmingham, where the 
Klan is strong. There is pronounced antagonism 
in cosmopolitan cities such as New Orleans. In 
Atlanta, the home of the Klan, formidable opposi¬ 
tion is quietly taking shape under the leadership 
of prominent pastors of the city. Curious to re¬ 
late, the state that was the hot-bed of Reconstruc¬ 
tion and old Klan activities, South Carolina, is 
one of the states least affected by the modern 
Klan. A prominent citizen of Columbia, where 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 37 


the carpet-bag legislature sat in all its sable glory 
in 1870, states: 44 The Ku Klux Klan is not in evi¬ 
dence in our section. ... I hear little about them 
and I think the sentiment is generally against 
them.” Reports from other sections of the state 
are 44 little interest,’’ 44 interest sporadic,” 44 hardly 
ever hear the Klan discussed.” 

Summarizing our data, we may conclude that, 
where the Klan is not active, the general opinion, 
based upon newspaper reports and more or less 
calm and impersonal judgment, is uniformly un¬ 
favorable. Where the Klan secures a foothold in 
the community and makes itself felt, as is often 
the case, in the role of moral reformer, unearthing 
the bootlegger or chastising criminals and dis¬ 
reputable characters that have escaped the law, 
the judgment is sometimes favorable. In com¬ 
munities where the Klan gets to be a power, 
where its secret hand is felt in business, politics, 
social and religious relations, there is always a 
strong, often bitter, undercurrent of anti-Klan 
sentiment. The Jbest citizens oppose it because it 
breeds social discord. But it is important to note 
that in almost every case this feeling is expressed 
with caution, the individual often not wishing to 
be quoted. The Klan is openly challenged by a 
few courageous individuals only. The rank and 


38 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


file even of the better citizens who do not approve 
of the Klan keep quiet from prudential mo¬ 
tives. Here we have the insidious influence of 
a powerful secret order in stifling public senti¬ 
ment. 


in 

A canvass of the motives for joining the Klan 
indicates that anti-Catholicism takes precedence 
over all others. Other incentives, to be sure, are 
mentioned, such as one hundred percent Ameri¬ 
canism, law and order, anti-Semitism, white su¬ 
premacy, and the purity of womanhood. But 
neither anti-Catholicism nor the other motives 
mentioned for supporting the Klan represent 
reasoned convictions. They are vague phrases 
symbolizing il sets” in the emotional life, conven¬ 
tional loyalties, unreasoned prejudices, or fixed 
ideas which the individual would be sadly non¬ 
plussed to justify critically. They serve a useful 
purpose, perhaps, in that they enable groups and 
communities to introduce some soyt of unity into 
thought and life. Critical reflection plays a 
very small part in the situation. The average 
man acquires his traditional mental attitudes, 
such as a prejudice against the Pope, not from 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 3^ 

any first-hand information about this individual 
but primarily through the impact of the prevail¬ 
ing uncritical Protestant antipathies to the Pope. 
It is primarily because of the absence of critical 
and independent thinking in these matters that 
the Klan is enabled to exploit these traditional 
loyalties in its own interest. 

While anti-Catholicism bulks largest in Klan ob¬ 
jectives it would be a mistake to suppose that 
anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, 
or one hundred percent Americanism occupied 
a prominent position at the inception of the 
modern Klan. As already indicated, the Klan 
at first was a “purely fraternal and patriotic or¬ 
ganization. ’ ’ It may be seriously doubted whether 
its founder ever intended at first that the Klan 
should play the role of reformer, seek to check the 
spread of the Catholic Church, or pose as the 
champion of the white race. In fact, the incen¬ 
tives used to gain members for the Klan have 
varied with the different stages of the Klan’s 
evolution. At the time of its inception, if we may 
trust the word of Emperor Simmons, the appeal 
of the Klan was intended to be that of a secret 
fraternal and patriotic organization drawing 
romantic inspiration from the old Ku Klux Klan, 
an appeal which, judging from the success of the 


40 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


Klan from 1915 to 1920, was not very effective. 
But even during this early period, as indicated 
by the occasional newspaper references to the 
Klan’s activities, it is probable that the role of a 
vigilance committee rather than that of a purely 
fraternal order was the real attraction of the 
Klan. The traditions of the old Klan Together 
with the lax post-war conditions acted to com¬ 
bine to turn the Klan into a sort of local hooded 
vigilantes. 

Through its stand for law and order the Klan 
gained the support of many of the best citizens 
made uneasy by the lawlessness of post-war days. 
In Houston, Texas, for example, there had been 
serious trouble with the Negro soldiery during 
the war. The Klan organizer played upon the 
fear born of this unpleasant experience to induce 
many of the leading citizens of Houston to join 
the Klan as a means of protecting the whites 
against possible outbreaks by the returned Negro 
soldiery. /JThe writer was informed by a member 
of the famous Morehouse Klan of Louisiana that 
long before the Klan appeared in that community 
the leading citizens had organized a “Law and 
Order League ’ 9 to correct the intolerable condi¬ 
tions that followed the war. When the Klan or¬ 
ganizers appeared these men identified themselves 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 41 


with it for the same reason that they had formed 
their “Law and Order League.” In almost every 
instance where the Klan is defended it is because 
of its efforts at local reform^) Invariably, when 
newly organized Klans asked the Atlanta authori¬ 
ties what to do, the reply was to “clean up” the 
community, no matter whether that community 
was New York City or Trinidad, Colorado. Here, 
then, we have in the Klan’s stand for law and 
order its earliest effective justification for its ex¬ 
istence, but a justification apparently never con¬ 
templated at the time of its organization. 

Obviously, however, the work of a vigilance 
committee is occasional and can only be justified 
where abnormal conditions exist. It offers no 
permanent basis for the life of an organization. 
To survive, the Klan had to find some more ef¬ 
fective appeal to the imaginations of men. When 
E. Y. Clarke and Mrs. Tyler, the real creators of 
the modem Klan, appeared upon the scene they 
were faced with this practical problem of finding 
something that would “sell.” With the instinct 
of practical salesmen they speedily discovered the 
possibilities that lay in the traditional hates and 
group prejudices that had been rubbed raw by the 
friction of a great war. Operating in Georgia, 
the state that had sent Thomas Watson, the arch 


42 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


Catholic-baiter, to the Senate, that had experi¬ 
enced a wave of anti-Semitism in connection with 
the trial of the Jew, Frank, and that had led the 
Union in lynchings of Negroes, it is not surpris¬ 
ing that these “salesmen of hate” speedily found 
that there were immense profits in purveying at 
ten dollars per initiate, anti-Catholicism, anti- 
Semitism and white supremacy, together with the 
more or less sentimental bargain-counter at¬ 
tractions of one hundred percent Americanism 
and the purity of womanhood. With its appeal to 
anti-Catholicism, for example, the Klan tapped 
at once a great stream of religious feeling that 
finds its fountain head in the fires of Smithfield 
and the Spanish Armada. The Klan thereby 
made connection with that powerful body of mid¬ 
dle class Protestant traditions which have regis¬ 
tered themselves in the Know-Nothing Party of 
the middle of the last century and in the A. P. A. 
movement towards its close. 

\ 

The final stage in the evolution of Klan objec¬ 
tives is reached when the Klan enters politics, a 
stage which seems to be more or less inevitable 
for the reason that in this country all movements 
of engrossing social significance sooner or later 
take on a political tinge. In a democracy it would 
appear that great social issues can only be solved 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 43 

in the political arena. In some cases, as in Ore¬ 
gon and Oklahoma, the Klan was forced into 
politics because the arm of the state was being 
used against it. It is obvious that when the Klan 
enters the political field it must tend to become but 
another political machine. This means the in¬ 
evitable loss of whatever moral or idealistic ap¬ 
peal it may have enjoyed. It is then thrown back 
upon the brute strength of its organization and 
the political skill of its leaders. Its career must 
from the very nature of the case be brief and end 
in defeat and disintegration. The issues that 
have given the Klan its vitality do not lend them¬ 
selves to political success, as is amply shown in 
the history of the Know-Nothings and of the 
A. P. A. movement. 


iv 

The story of the growth of the Klan in Oregon 
is most enlightening as illustrating Klan methods 
and suggesting what may be the future of the 
Klan movement. The Klan in Oregon is an im¬ 
portation from California and was organized in 
Medford, Jackson County, January, 1921. The 
enforcement of the prohibition law against the 
boot-leggers was then a live issue in the county, 


44 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


and many joined the Klan for the avowed purpose 
of assisting the officers of the law. Racial and re¬ 
ligious antagonisms seem to have played no part 
at the birth of the Klan in Oregon. In a state 
where eighty-five percent of its people is native 
white, three percent Negroes, five percent Orien¬ 
tals, and less than eight percent Catholic, it would 
appear that there was a complete lack of all those 
things upon which the Klan was accustomed to 
thrive. Yet the Klan grew rapidly. Here, as in 
the case of the parent Klan at Atlanta, it appears 
that clever “salesmanship” had much to do with 
the rapidity of its growth. Grand Dragon Fred 
L. Gifford, L. I. Powell, H. E. Griffith, and others, 
proved themselves to be leaders of more than 
usual ability. This hardly suffices, however, to 
explain the astonishing readiness with which the 
people of Oregon, only one and one-half percent 
of whom are illiterate, swallowed the Klan doc¬ 
trines. 

The bulk of the people of Oregon came from 
the great central Mississippi Valley. The recent 
picturization of Emerson Hough’s story, The 
Covered Wagon, shows the long and painful 
journey of the early pioneers from Missouri 
across the desert to the green valleys of the 
Pacific slope where their descendants now live. 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 45 


They belong, therefore, to that old American 
stock from which throughout the Middle West 
the anti-Catholic and native American movements, 
the Know-Nothingism and the A. P. A., drew their 
chief support. Their mental attitudes, in spite of 
their freer western life, are not essentially dif¬ 
ferent from those of the people of Texas, Mis¬ 
souri, Kansas, and Indiana. The anti-Catholic 
tradition has been generally familiar to them 
from childhood. Furthermore, these people set¬ 
tled in a state that consists of a vast central area 
of mountains and alkaline desert fringed on the 
north and west by narrow and fertile valleys. 
There are few great trunk lines and it is easy to 
imagine that social traditions would remain 
largely unchallenged, in spite of an admirable edu¬ 
cational system, in these narrow and shut-in val¬ 
leys. It was throughout this region, at least, that 
the Klan spread with amazing rapidity and ap¬ 
parently without being challenged. Within a year 
there were few communities that did not have a 
Klan organization. 

In a community congenial to Klan ideas and 
providing able leaders and organizers, it was in¬ 
evitable that the Klan should get into politics. 
Two things seem to have hastened the coming 
of the political stage in the evolution of the Klan 


46 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


in Oregon, namely, the political ambitions of the 
Klan leaders and the proclamation of Governor 
Olcott on May 13, 1922, condemning the Klan be¬ 
cause of its alleged connection with night-riding 
outrages in Medford and other places. This 
proclamation precipitated a bitter political fight 
in which Governor Olcott lost his office, the Klan 
using its influence to secure the election of the 
Democratic candidate, Walter N. Pierce, besides 
putting through the so-called ‘ ‘ compulsory school 
bill” aimed at the Catholic schools. While the 
campaign for the school bill was primarily a fight 
for political power, religious issues were drawn 
into it. The Klan, to forward its political schemes, 
made extended and unscrupulous appeals to the 
traditional anti-Catholic prejudices of the people. 
Governor Olcott, a Protestant, was referred to as 
“a candidate whose every recent act has borne the 
indelible stamp of the Catholic Pope in Rome.” 
They adopted the ancient ruse, practised in the 
Know-Nothing and A. P. A. movements, of put¬ 
ting forward 4 ‘escaped” nuns who toured the state 
warning against the Catholic menace. In its ef¬ 
fort to strengthen its political power the Klan 
sought the aid of the women and Americans of 
foreign birth, the auxiliary orders of the Ladies 
of the Invisible Empire and the Royal Riders of 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 47 

the Red Robe being organized for this purpose. 
The Klan, which apparently never numbered 
over a hundred thousand members in the state, 
achieved its success politically by securing either 
as members or else as sympathizers political 
leaders and men prominent in business and civic 
affairs, by occasional appeal to the boycott, by the 
use of affiliated organizations such as the Ladies 
of the Invisible Empire and the Royal Riders of 
the Red Robe, and above all by acting as a united 
and militant minority, the Klan i 4 bloc/ ’ 

There are indications that the people of Oregon 
are wearying of Klan rule and for reasons that 
are exceedingly suggestive to the student of the 
Klan movement. In the first place the inevitable 
repercussion of the Klan “compulsory school act” 
is already in evidence. This act compels every 
parent or guardian, with certain minor excep¬ 
tions, to send all children under their care be¬ 
tween eight and sixteen to the public school or 
“be guilty of a misdemeanor, and each day’s fail¬ 
ure to send such child to a public school shall con¬ 
stitute a separate offence . 9 9 Though this measure 
was proposed by a Scottish Rites Mason it seems 
to have been drafted by Klansmen and put 
through by their support. Leading Masons have 
condemned it. The real offence of this bill, which 


48 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


does not become law until 1926, and even then 
must run the chances of being pronounced uncon¬ 
stitutional, lies in the fact that it was drafted and 
put through by an organization that is militantly 
and avowedly anti-Catholic and anti-Jew. That 
is to say, it was not based upon any calm and 
statesmanlike consideration of what was best edu¬ 
cationally for all concerned, but was actuated pri¬ 
marily by religious animosity. This, not to men¬ 
tion other criticisms to which it is subject, dis¬ 
credits the bill with all good, liberal-minded 
citizens. 

The difficulties encountered by the courts in 
their efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of 
the “necktie parties’’ and other night-riding out¬ 
rages in Jackson County are also opening the eyes 
of the people of Oregon to the menace of a secret 
and oath-bound organization when its influence 
extends to the witness stand and the jury-box. 
Finally, it is being discovered in cities such as 
Portland, Astoria, and Medford, where the Klan 
is strong, that the presence in the community of 
a secret order, bent upon its own political ag¬ 
grandizement, is deadly poison to civic spirit and 
hence to social progress. Chambers of Commerce 
and even fraternal organizations are feeling the 
disruptive effect of the Klan. Neighborhood civic 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 49 

clubs are being stifled by the atmosphere of secrecy 
and suspicion bred by the Klan. The boycott, it 
is being discovered, does not increase business. 
In short, Oregon is finding out that the Klan as 
a social institution does not pay. The religious, 
political, business, and social discord that follow 
in its train are inimical to the material as well 
as to the spiritual interests of the community. 

v 

The story of the Klan in Oregon is most instruc¬ 
tive as throwing light upon the significance of this 
order in American life. Here is a state composed 
of eighty-five percent native Americans. It has no 
race problem. It is predominantly Protestant in 
faith, the Catholics forming but eight percent of 
the population. It is not torn by industrial 
conflict. It is not threatened by radicalism in any 
form. It has progressive laws, an admirable edu¬ 
cational system, less than two percent of illiteracy. 
Yet this typical American state has been com¬ 
pletely overrun and, for a time at least, politically 
dominated by a secret oath-bound organization 
preaching religious bigotry and racial animosity 
and seeking primarily its own political aggrandize¬ 
ment. One asks how this is possible. The first 


50 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


outstanding fact is the impotence of public opinion 
where such a state of affairs is possible. There 
must be a singular lack of independent, critical 
public sentiment in a community that is such an 
easy victim of the Klan. One feels that the edu¬ 
cational system of Oregon, in spite of one and one- 
half percent illiteracy, must be after all a very 
mechanical affair. Her sons and daughters, as in 
her sister states, pass with measured tread 
through public school, high school and university, 
assimilating the external mechanical symbols of 
culture, and yet these symbols remain mere 
symbols, traditional, educational and cultural 
stereotypes. These prospective citizens have not 
been schooled to the critical analysis of their intel¬ 
lectual heritage. So long as one is clever enough 
to clothe his propaganda in the familiar dress of 
these stereotypes he finds ready and uncritical 
acceptance. 

A second observation suggested by the Oregon 
situation is the lack of the spirit of real tolerance 
in American society. When the Catholic Church 
established Newman Hall at the seat of Oregon’s 
state university and sent an able priest, Rev. 
Edwin V. O’Hara, to look after the interests of 
Catholic students, thus taking a long step towards 
adjusting itself to the state system of education, 


THE RISE OF THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE 51 

the Klan was able, thanks to the ingrained intoler¬ 
ance of the community, to decry this as a deep 
and devilish Catholic scheme to overthrow Prot¬ 
estantism and set up the rule of the Pope. This 
is a most incredible and at the same time a most 
humiliating situation. It seems to indicate that 
the mass of Americans are still medieval in their 
thinking. There is food for thought in the fact 
that states like Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma, and 
Indiana, with low illiteracy, with admirable state 
systems of education culminating in great uni¬ 
versities with thousands of students, are least 
immune to the propaganda of the Fundamen¬ 
talists and the Ku Klux Klan. In spite of the 
millions spent on education it would appear that 
we do not really train our citizenship to think in 
matters of religion, politics, or economics. Re¬ 
ligious tolerance requires, in a measure at least, 
reflection. It is more than the easy-going, laissez- 
faire philosophy of the pioneer. It demands social 
imagination and the ability through sympathetic 
insight to enter into the inner life of our fellows. 
To the average Protestant the soul of the devout 
Roman Catholic is a sealed book. 





CHAPTER III 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 

The modern Ku Klux Klan is rooted in the past 
and for that reason can be properly judged 
only in the light of the historical perspective. 
The Edan is a highly complex social phenomenon 
and yet it is possible to distinguish two main 
sources from which it has sprung. Its name, 
methods, and paraphernalia were suggested 
by the Klan of Reconstruction days. Its ideals, 
on the other hand, or at least the objectives that 
have made it attractive to large groups of the 
American people, have been derived in the main 
from that great stream of social traditions and 
habits of thought which we may cover with the 
blanket term of Native Americanism. To the 
student of history it is perfectly obvious that for 
the antecedents of anti-Catholicism, anti-Semi¬ 
tism, and one hundred percent Americanism we 
must go, not to the Klan of Reconstruction days, 
but to such native American movements as the 
Know-Nothings of the middle of the last century 

53 


54 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

and the American Protective Association of the 
nineties. It is the object of this chapter to point 
out the connections between the modern Klan and 
the Klan of Reconstruction. 

i 

The old and the new Klans are similar in that 
both have been the objects of passionate hates and 
passionate loyalties. Sweet reasonableness has 
characterized neither their friends nor their foes. 
For example, a member of the United Daughters 
of the Confederacy asserts that when the tale of 
the South “is all told, and the history of her 
labors in war and peace has been recounted, no 
brighter chapter in all her history, no fairer page, 
will ever he read than that which tells of that il¬ 
lustrious and glorious organization called the Ku 
Klux Klan” (Mrs. S. E. F. Rose, The Ku Klux 
Kim or the Invisible Empire, p. 75). On the other 
hand, Senator John Sherman of Ohio, on the floor 
of the Senate Chamber, March 18, 1871, made use 
of the following language: “If any senator now, 
in looking over the record of crime of all ages, 
can tell me of an association, a conspiracy, or a 
hand of men who combined in their acts and in 
their purposes more that is diabolical than this 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 55 

Ku Klux Klan I should like to know where it is. 
They are secret, oath-bound; they murder, rob, 
plunder, whip, and scourge; and they commit 
these crimes, not upon the high and lofty, but 
upon the lowly, upon the poor, upon feeble men 
and women who are utterly defenseless.’’ Truly 
an interesting statement coming from a represen¬ 
tative of a state in which to-day the revived Klan 
probably numbers half a million. Similarly the 
modern Klan is inordinately praised as “the most 
dauntless organization known to man” and minis¬ 
ters of the Gospel of brotherly love and charity 
place the fiery cross side by side with the cross of 
Calvary in their churches. On the walls of a pub¬ 
lic building in a small Southern town the writer 
found scribbled, “The K. K. K. are a bunch of 
yellow dogs; they have to hide their faces”; be¬ 
neath this was written, “King Solomon had 
nothing on the Pope and his harem at Rome,” 
together with other things, unprintable in their 
language, indicating antagonisms hardly compati¬ 
ble with a healthful and happy community life. 
Wherever the Klan appears as a social issue we 
find unleashed some of the most unchristian and 
thoroughly despicable traits of human nature. 
The Klan loves a good hater. 

Much light is thrown upon the modern Klan by 


56 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


a knowledge of the atmosphere that surrounded 
its predecessor. It seems worth while, then, to 
examine for a moment the conditions that gave 
rise to the old Klan of the late sixties and early 
seventies. The atmosphere of the old Klan is ad¬ 
mirably reproduced in the diary of a Southerner, 
Randolph Shotwell, written in a Northern prison 
during the early seventies, where he was confined 
because of alleged activities in the Ku Klux Klan 
in North Carolina. 1 Shotwell was a newspaper 
editor and was afterwards a member of the legis¬ 
lature of his state. The writer is indebted to Mr. 
Harris Dickson of Vicksburg, Mississippi, for ac¬ 
cess to the manuscript of this diary, which is not 
without historical value as being a first-hand ac¬ 
count of these troublous times by a participant. 
This is the excuse for quoting it somewhat at 
length. The account, cast in dialogue form, is re¬ 
produced without criticism: 

“Ques . Will you state the origin of the Klan? 

“Ans. The Ku Klux Klan (using that familiar 
generic term for the several societies of which it 
was composed) was the legitimate offspring of 

i The writer is indebted to Prof. J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton of 
the University of North Carolina for this statement with regard 
to Shotwell: “Undertaking in 1870 to check the excesses of the 
Ku Klux, which he had never joined, he was arrested for partici¬ 
pation in a raid at which he was not present, and after a farce of 
a trial, preceded by very brutal treatment, he was sentenced to 
Albany for six years and was fined $5,000.” 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


57 


the Loyal Union League and the Freedmen’s Bu¬ 
reau, and consequently owes its existence to radi¬ 
cal legislation. [The Freedmen’s Bureau was 
intended to mediate between ex-slave and former 
master and was therefore educative and social in 
purpose, though antagonistic to the prevailing 
Southern attitude. The Union League, a degen¬ 
erate reproduction of a great original, was a cor¬ 
rupt and thoroughly unscrupulous political organi¬ 
zation bent upon spoliation through the Negro 
vote.] The humiliations, the exactions, the perse¬ 
cutions and personal annoyances put upon the 
Southern people by the swarms of adventurers 
and sharpers which settled upon the land under the 
auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the In¬ 
ternal Revenue Department, can never be realized 
except by those who had the misfortune to experi¬ 
ence them. Every town and village had its petty 
autocrat in uniform, whose mandates were law to 
the surrounding country and whose ill will was, 
more to be feared than the presence of a hostile* 
army. At this day it sounds laughable to tell of a. 
martial hero, with drawn sword, chasing a half- 
witted countryman through the street of a peaceful 
town to cut a few rusty Confederate buttons off: 
his jacket or sending a file of bayonets to arrest a 
respectable lady because her little girls had been 
seen playing in the back yard with something that 


58 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


looked like a Rebel flag. Yet such exploits were 
common in many parts of the South as late as 
1867. 

“From the first it was apparently the common 
object of all classes of Federal officials to excite 
an antagonism of races. No opportunity was lost 
to alienate the slave from his late master. The 
freedmen, uninfluenced by outsiders, would for the 
most part have continued to work and sing and 
dance on the old plantation content to receive a 
moderate allowance of the crop and sure to look 
to 4 ole Massa* for advice and assistance in all 
troublous circumstances. But this would not do 
for the Bureau. The idle and vicious were lured 
from the farms by the issue of free rations, while 
the more industrious were kept in perpetual ex¬ 
citement by plausible reports that their former 
masters were plotting to put them back into slav¬ 
ery. The Bureau took cognizance of all disputes 
between Whites and Blacks and as no occasion 
was lost to browbeat the former, for the diversion 
of the latter, Sambo was not slow in coming to 
the conclusion that the ‘bottom rail was on top’ 
sure enough. 

“Any person acquainted with the excessive 
vanity and emotional nature of the Negro will not 
need to be told that his mind soon became unset- 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


59 


tied and poisoned by such treatment. Nor will it 
appear strange that he was speedily duped into 
mental subjection to his new-found friends far 
more abject and binding than the physical re¬ 
straint from which he had been so recently re¬ 
lieved. The immediate practical effect of the Bu¬ 
reau System was to collect the Negroes in towns, 
where they gave their attention to politics and 
privilege, wdrile the farmers, for lack of hands, 
were obliged to reduce the number of acres under 
cultivation. To give an illustration: The city of 
Newbern, N. C., with a resident population of 
less than six thousand whites, had, in ’66-’67, a 
floating population of near ten thousand Negroes, 
although only a few miles in the adjacent country 
farm servants could not be hired at any price. 
As might have been expected, crime and disorder 
were fearfully frequent. Being at the time asso¬ 
ciate Editor of The Daily Journal of Commerce, I 
had occasion to chronicle a dozen or more mur¬ 
ders in less than half as many months. Burglary 
and highway robbery were the regular morning 
news items. Now in the sedate and law-abiding 
Old North State capital crimes have never been 
common and a murder makes a terrible noise, so 
that the new order of things created great alarm 
and indignation. 


60 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


“At this juncture a far more threatening as¬ 
pect was given to our domestic perplexities by the 
introduction of the Union League. Having long 
foreseen that Negro suffrage was inevitable, the 
wire-pullers of the Republican Party . . . began 
to scheme for the new political element (the 
Negro vote). There were already two secret so¬ 
cieties in the state, the ‘Red Strings’ and the 
‘Heroes of America,’ but the Negro had not been 
taken into them* . . . They (the Radicals) speed¬ 
ily enlisted the whole influence of the Government 
in favor of the League and in a few months there 
were not one hundred colored votes in the state, 
scarcely as many in the entire South, unbound by 
a secret oath to vote for the Radical candidates. 
Large numbers of timid and ignorant white men 
were likewise driven into this Radical Klan by 
dread of confiscation and loss of their civil privi¬ 
leges, it being asserted openly on the stump by 
League orators that the Government designed to 
take away the ballot from all who did not register 
on the Republican Rolls. I recollect hearing 
Judge Logan, one of the leaders of the League 
Party, publicly proclaim to an assemblage of ex¬ 
cited Negroes that he would rather enfranchise 
the dogs than the Rebels , meaning the decent and 
intelligent portion of the community. 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


61 


“The incompetency and corruption of the new 
judiciary was felt more than anything else, ex¬ 
cept the fearful multiplication of taxes, because 
the people of North Carolina have been accus¬ 
tomed to regard their courts with great pride and 
veneration. The new judges had been chosen, not 
for their ability or merit, but solely in regard to 
their service as party leaders. Several of them 
were notoriously incompetent: one is said habitu¬ 
ally to have spelled January with a small ‘g.’ 
One or two of them were and still are charged 
with serious peculations. 

“Throughout the South it was everywhere the 
same old story, the Negroes duped and corrupted 
by the Bureau, enticed into a secret, dark-lantern 
League, a Legislature controlled by carpet-bag¬ 
gers, a Governor with one hand in the treasury, 
a judiciary disgracing itself and making a mock¬ 
ery of the law! And everywhere the people groan¬ 
ing under intolerable taxes and sighing for peace. 
We are now ready for the introduction of the 
Klan. The feeling had become almost universal 
that there should be some organization of good 
men for the suppression of crime and to counter¬ 
act the pernicious teaching of the League.” 

Under the circumstances it was inevitable that 
such an organization should be secret and that it 


62 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

should draw its material from the members of the 
recent Confederacy. 


h 

It was Voltaire who said that sa majeste le 
Hasard has much to do with the development of 
the drama of history. Apparently it was accident 
that gave rise to the curious and awe-inspiring 
term “Ku Klux Klan.” In May, 1866, a group 
of young men gathered in a law office of Pulaski, 
Tennessee, a small but cultured town near the 
Alabama line, and finding time hanging heavy on 
their hands after the stirring experiences of the 
war, decided to organize a club. The idea was 
enthusiastically received and various names were 
suggested, among them “Kukloi” the plural of 
the word Kuklos, the Greek for circle. “Ku 
Klux,” a harbarization of Kuklos, was suggested 
by some one and at once adopted. To carry out 
the alliteration Klan was added, and hence the 
name Ku Klux Klan. 

The newly organized Klan enjoyed great popu¬ 
larity during the summer and fall of 1866, and 
various “dens” were established in the country 
and towns in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and 
even in remoter sections. By the spring of 1866, 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


63 


however, this organization had undergone a 
change by which it was transformed through the 
pressure of conditions described above into a se¬ 
cret society, the object of which was not pleasure 
but social regulation . Several things contributed 
to this transformation. In the first place the oath- 
bound secrecy, the atmosphere of mystery, the 
weird attire and ritual, when taken in connection 
with the prevailing disturbed condition of society, 
tended to convince outsiders and even the mem¬ 
bers of the Klan that it must have some more 
serious purpose than mere fun. More important, 
however, was the discovery that the secrecy and 
mystery of the weird costumes held altogether un¬ 
foreseen possibilities for the control of the Negro 
population which, thanks to the policies of Recon¬ 
struction, was fast getting out from under the 
control of its old masters and under the leader¬ 
ship of carpet-baggers was being organized into 
the secret and powerful Union League to set up 
Negro rule. 

This role of social regulators being thrust upon 
the Klan by force of social conditions, it became 
necessary to perfect its organization, to which 
end the Grand Cyclops of the Pulaski “den” 
called a convention in Nashville in the summer of 
1867. At this meeting, attended by delegates 


64 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


from Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and other 
states the society was reorganized, a statement of 
principles adopted, officers appointed and assigned 
to different territories. The Klan was designated 
“the Invisible Empire.” Its principles included 
“all that is chivalric in conduct, noble in senti¬ 
ment, generous in manhood and patriotic in pur¬ 
pose.” Its more specific objects were: (1) “To 
protect the weak, the innocent, the defenseless, 
from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the 
lawless, the violent, and the brutal; to relieve the 
injured and oppressed, to succor the suffering and 
unfortunate and especially the widows and or¬ 
phans of Confederate soldiers. (2) To protect 
and defend the Constitution of the United States, 
and all laws passed in conformity thereto and to 
protect the states and the people thereof from 
all invasion from any source whatever. (3) To 
aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional 
laws and to protect the people from all unlawful 
seizure and from trial except by their peers in 
conformity with the laws of the land.” The “In¬ 
visible Empire” was presided over by a Grand 
Wizard. The “realms,” coterminous with the 
states, were ruled by Grand Dragons, the “do¬ 
minions” or congressional districts by a Grand 
Titan, and each “den” by a Grand Cyclops. To 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


65 


these Were added a Grand Monk, Grand Scribe, 
Grand Exchequer, Grand Turk, and a Grand Sen¬ 
tinel. Some of these titles it will be seen have 
been perpetuated in the modern Klan. 

The Klan played a most important role in the 
overthrow of carpet-bag rule. A large number 
of Negroes, especially those living on the planta¬ 
tions, were rescued from the dominance of the 
Union League, though among the Negroes of the 
towns and cities the League still exercised con¬ 
siderable power. Burnings of cotton gins, petty 
thievery, and assaults upon women became rare. 
Labor was more dependable. The power of the 
scalawag and the carpet-bagger was broken, some 
of the most disreputable among them being driven 
from the country. But there were features of the 
Ku Klux Klan that went far to vitiate these good 
results. It was, in the first place, an organization 
that worked in secret and, secondly, it was forced, 
in spite of its lofty statements as to loyalty to 
constituted law, to accomplish its ends in extra- 
legal ways. These inherent weaknesses were not 
long in revealing themselves and finally brought 
the Klan itself into thorough disrepute among the 
best people of the South. As a Southern author¬ 
ity has said, they transformed 4 ‘the Ku Klux 
Klan from a band of regulators, honestly trying 


66 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


to preserve peace and order, into a body of des¬ 
perate men who, in 1869, convulsed the country 
and set at defiance the mandates of both state and 
Federal governments.’’ To be sure, the Grand 
Dragon of the Realm of Tennessee issued a sol¬ 
emn warning, but all in vain. The Klan had 
been instrumental in liberating forces of lawless¬ 
ness which, thanks to its own inherent weaknesses, 
the Klan was utterly unable to check. The better 
men began to desert the order and in 1869 it was 
formally disbanded by Grand Wizard Forrest, the 
famous Confederate leader. 

Though disbanded as a formal organization it 
can hardly be said that the Klan ceased to exist. 
The Grand Wizard’s decree of dissolution never 
reached all the various 41 dens” and they contin¬ 
ued to exist, becoming more and more a law unto 
themselves. As the better men left the order, the 
criminal elements began to make use of it to fur¬ 
ther their ends until the Ku Klux Klan came to be 
synonymous with every form of disguised lawless¬ 
ness in a community that was fast verging upon 
social chaos. The severe anti-Ku Klux laws 
passed by the various carpet-bag governments 
failed utterly. President Grant then intervened, 
suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and placed 
sections under martial law. It has been assumed 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


67 


that “the vigorous supervision exercised by the 
Federal government in all parts of the South was 
instantly effective” (Oberholtzer, History of the 
United States since the Civil War, Vol. II, p. 
390). So far as the immediate and superficial 
suppression of acts of violence was concerned 
this was perhaps true. But the real reason for 
the cessation of the Ku Klux “outrages” was 
that by this time the South had begun to regain 
home rule and was therefore in a position to ac¬ 
complish by overt and more or less legal methods 
the ends it had been forced to seek in the days of 
oppression through the secret and extra-legal 
agency of the Klan. 


m 

In all the official utterances of the modern Klan 
a continuity of tradition is assumed to exist be¬ 
tween it and the Klan of Reconstruction days. 
The letter-head scattered broadcast over the land 
from the “imperial aulic” at Atlanta bears at its 
top this legend, “The most sublime lineage in all 
history commemorating and perpetuating as it 
does the most dauntless organization known to 
man,” and at its bottom, “In the name of our 
fathers—for country, our homes, and each other.” 


68 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


The cover pages of Klan literature bear the words, 
“We were here yesterday, we are here to-day, we 
will be here forever.” The Kloran, containing 
the ritual of the Klan and written by Emperor 
Simmons, clearly presupposes the continuity of 
old Klan traditions, and the first degree is an ex¬ 
travagant eulogy of the old Klan. The original 
Klan organized by Simmons included four mem¬ 
bers of the old Klan and the Klan charter of 1915 
may be looked upon as a sort of legal sanction 
for the appropriation of old Klan traditions, titles, 
costumes, and the like. 

It was natural for some romantic Southerner to 
seek to revive the old Klan among a people who 
looked upon it as the defender of their homes and 
of their civilization in their struggle against cruel 
injustice and unparalleled oppression. It must 
be remembered that the South is the most roman¬ 
tically and uncritically sentimental of all sec¬ 
tions of the country. It is unable to see a spot 
on the records of its heroes; an unvarnished nar¬ 
rative of the brute facts regarding the old Klan 
would appear to many Southerners little short of 
sacrilege. Finally, it must be remembered that 
the fearful years of Reconstruction served to in¬ 
grain deeply into the life of the South social habits 
that tend to condone extra-legal methods of at- 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


69 


taining justice. Here, if anywhere, we must look 
for the explanation of the strange apathy of the 
masses of the South to the dangers of hooded and 
self-appointed regulators of the welfare of the 
community. 

The question may very well he raised, however, 
as to why the modern revival of the old Klan 
should be so popular in the North. It seems by 
tradition and spirit to be a purely Southern insti¬ 
tution. The social tradition in the North with re¬ 
gard to the Klan would seem indeed to be an¬ 
tagonistic. At the close of the war and for years 
afterwards the attitude of the masses of the North 
towards the Klan was doubtless in full sympathy 
with Senator John Sherman’s denunciation of the 
Klan on the floor of the Senate, March 18th, 1871, 
quoted above. By a curious irony of fate the re¬ 
vived Ku Klux Klan, still “secret,” still u oath- 
bound,” and still engaged in the business of 
whipping defenseless men and women, numbers 
several hundred thousand in Ohio, the state that 
gave John Sherman birth and which he repre¬ 
sented in the United States Senate. What has 
brought about this transformation in the North¬ 
ern attitude towards the Klan! 

Many things have doubtless contributed to the 
modification of Northern sentiment in regard to 


70 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


the Klan. First among these is the effect of the 
mere flight of time. A half-century has elapsed 
since Sherman pronounced his condemnation of 
the Klan in the Senate. There has arisen a gen¬ 
eration that “knows not Joseph” and that does 
not understand the feelings of its fathers. There 
is in the North generally (as opposed to the 
South) a striking lack of continuity in social tra¬ 
ditions. Communities like Boston and New Eng¬ 
land have undergone a complete transformation. 
The Boston of Charles Sumner is now little more 
than a pious memory. To the engulfing tide of 
immigration which has swept away the old social 
and racial traditions is to be added the disintegrat¬ 
ing effect of industrialism. In the great manu¬ 
facturing centers of New England and Pennsyl¬ 
vania about the only tie that unites men is the 
impersonal bond of the daily wage. In the South, 
on the other hand, there are large sections, as in 
the Valley of Virginia, where family and culture 
and social tradition still hold their own against 
the dollar. In the industrial North, with its im¬ 
personal cash nexus, its welter of foreigners still 
unassimilated, the Klan of Reconstruction days 
was almost as unknown ten years ago as the 
Knights Templars or the Vehmgericht. 

There were, to be sure, forces at work in the 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


71 


North paving the way for a sympathetic under¬ 
standing of the old Klan, foremost among them 
being the increased immigration of the Negro and 
the consequent emergence of the “color line” in 
those communities where the blacks were present 
in large numbers. Eay Stannard Baker, in his in¬ 
teresting study, Following the Color Line, has 
traced the gradual change of sentiment in the 
North due to this increased pressure of racial 
groups. But just a year or so before the organi¬ 
zation of the modern Klan an event took place of 
the very first importance in its influence upon 
Northern sentiment toward the Klan, namely, the 
production of David W. Griffith’s great moving 
picture, “The Birth of a Nation.” It is simply 
impossible to estimate the educative effect of this 
film-masterpiece upon public sentiment. It is 
probable that the great majority of adult Ameri¬ 
cans have at one time or another seen this film. 
In the Boston theaters, where it was admitted 
only after a bitter fight that served merely to ad¬ 
vertise it, the picture was shown twice daily from 
April to September, 1915, to a total of almost four 
hundred thousand spectators. It broke the rec¬ 
ords in Boston and New York and in other large 
cities. That the modern Klan recognized the ad¬ 
vertising value of “The Birth of a Nation” seems 


72 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

to be indicated in tbe proposal to make use of a 
moving picture as part of the Klan propaganda 
which “ shows the hooded figures of the Knights 
of the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue, and 
portrays the final triumph of decent and orderly 
government by real Americans over the alien in¬ 
fluences now at work in our midst . 99 It will doubt¬ 
less always be a matter of debate whether the in¬ 
fluence of “The Birth of a Nation” was pre¬ 
dominantly good or bad. It did undoubtedly 
make many aware for the first time of the wicked¬ 
ness and injustice of the Reconstruction period. 
The weakness of this picture does not lie so much 
in its exaggeration of the evils of Negro domina¬ 
tion in the South, an exaggeration permissible 
perhaps in the interest of artistic effect, as 
in the fact that it shows the Klan only in its best 
aspects and before it had been made use of by 
evil men for the perpetration of outrages even 
worse than those it was designed to eliminate. 

IV 

Before the committee of Congress Emperor 
Simmons emphatically disavowed, as we have seen, 
any connection between the modern Klan and the 
old Klan of Reconstruction days. This disavowal 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


73 


is not borne out by the facts in regard to the ac¬ 
tivities of the modern Klan. The modern Klan 
reflects the methods and the spirit of the old Klan 
in many ways. Randolph Shotwell, in his account 
already quoted/ states that the methods used by 
the old Klan were “at first of a somewhat ludi¬ 
crous nature. In various parts of the country, 
where the Negroes had been most unruly, a huge 
terrific monster, giant, hobgoblin, or even Old 
Nick himself, stalked into the village on a moon¬ 
light night, and performed several supernatural 
feats, such as drinking two or three buckets of 
water or blowing an immense volume of flame 
from the nose, and after exhorting certain evil¬ 
doers to beware of a second visit, suddenly de¬ 
parted amid such an infernal uproar that many 
old ‘Aunties’ will never believe that human 
agency had anything to do with it. Absurd and 
childish as it may seem, yet such a warning 
usually had stronger effect than all the penalties 
of the law in restraining the insolence and row- 
dyish propensities of the Negroes. Of course the 
more intelligent suspected the trick but as it im¬ 
plied a mystery or mysterious organization they 
were none the less awed.” 

In this role of social control through intimida¬ 
tion one of the most effective instruments, of 


74 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


course, was the Klan costume. It is described as 
a 4 4 long gown with loose flowing sleeves, with a 
hood in which the apertures for the eyes, nose and 
mouth are trimmed with some red material. 
The hood has three horns, made of some common 
cotton stuff, in shape something like candy bags, 
stuffed and wrapped with red strings; the horns 
stand out on the front and sides of the hood. 
When a costume is worn by a person he is com¬ 
pletely disguised by it. He does not speak in his 
natural tone of voice and uses a mystical style of 
language and is armed with a revolver, a knife, 
and a stick.’’ But these hooded regulators did 
not depend upon their costume alone to subdue 
the Negro. The costume was often equipped with 
a leather bag, the use of which is indicated in the 
following incident. 44 A night traveller called at 
the Negro quarters somewhere in Attrakapas 
(La.) and asked for water. After he had drunk 
three blue buckets of good cistern water at which 
the Negro was much astonished, he thanked the 
colored man and told him he was very thirsty, 
that he had travelled nearly a thousand miles in 
twenty-four hours and that was the best drink of 
water he had had since he was killed in the battle 
of Shiloh. The Negro dropped the bucket, tumbled 
over two chairs and a table, escaped through a 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


75 


back window, and has not since been heard from. 
He was a radical Negro.” Sometimes the ghostly 
riders carried skeleton hands concealed in their 
sleeves and insisted upon shaking hands with 
Negroes, with what effect can well be imagined. 
A hooded specter sometimes took off his head, 
supported by some artificial framework from the 
shoulders, and asked a horrified Negro to hold it 
until he could “fix his back-bone.” What the ef¬ 
fects of such childish pranks were upon the Negro 
just free from slavery can only be appreciated by 
one who has had first-hand knowledge of the ex¬ 
tent to which the lives of the Negro peasantry of 
the far South are still ruled by superstition and 
fear. 

Perhaps the most effective method used by the 
Klan to impress the community with a sense of 
its mysterious power was the nightly parade, a 
method still used with great effect by the revived 
Klan. The following description of the first pa¬ 
rade of the Klan in Pulaski the fourth of July, 
1867, is so closely paralleled by parades of the 
modern Klan that it may well be reproduced here. 
As a result of the printed notice, 1 ‘ The Klan will 
parade the streets to-night,” an expectant crowd 
gathered from the town and surrounding country 
and lined the streets. “The members of the Klan 


76 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


in the country left their homes in the afternoon 
and travelled alone or in squads of two or three 
with their paraphernalia carefully concealed. . . . 
After nightfall they assembled at designated 
points. . . . Here they donned their robes and 
disguises and put covers of gaudy material on 
their horses. A skyrocket sent up from some point 
in the town was the signal to mount and move. 
The different companies met and passed each 
other in the public square in perfect silence; the 
discipline appeared to be admirable. Not a word 
was spoken. Necessary orders were given by 
means of whistles. In single file, in death-like 
stillness, with funereal slowness, they marched 
and counter-marched throughout the town. While 
the column was headed north on one street it was 
going south on another. By crossing in opposite 
directions the lines were kept up in almost un¬ 
broken continuity. The effect was to create the 
impression of vast numbers. This marching and 
counter-marching was kept up for about two hours 
and the Klan departed as noiselessly as they 
came. The public were more than ever mystified. 
. . . Perhaps the greatest illusion produced by it 
was in regard to the numbers participating in it. 
Reputable citizens were confident that the num¬ 
ber was not less than three thousand. . . . The 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 77 

truth is that the number of the Ku Klux in the 
parade did not exceed four hundred.” 

It will hardly be denied that the modern Klan 
has retained in its hood and gown, its silent pa¬ 
rades and fiery torches, the very spirit and method 
of the old Klan. It still seeks to intimidate the 
community through the mysterious exhibit of its 
masked members. It still endeavors to control 
free and enlightened Americans through the fear 
of a vast and mysterious Invisible Empire that 
“sees all and hears all.” Now, to one familiar 
with the history of the old Klan this retention 
of its spirit and methods by the modern Klan is, 
to say the least, not very flattering to the citi¬ 
zenship of modern America. It implies that an 
intelligent and sovereign people can be controlled 
and manipulated as the ignorant Negro, fresh 
from the shackles of slavery, was controlled by 
the childish mummeries of the old Ku Klux Ed an 
with its hideous masks, its skeleton hands, and its 
false heads. Such methods of procedure, it need 
only be suggested, are a gross insult to the intel¬ 
ligence and self-respect of a free people. They at¬ 
tribute to American citizens a childish susceptibil¬ 
ity to the ghostly parades of masked mummers 
which one would expect to find to-day only among 
the inhabitants of a village of darkest Africa. 


78 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


v 

But even the Negroes of Reconstruction days 
speedily outgrew this attempt to control them by 
such childish means. The old Klan had to make 
use of more strenuous methods. There is scarcely 
a page of the thirteen volumes of the famous Ku 
Kiux investigations of 1871-2 that does not chron¬ 
icle a whipping of Negro or white. The justifica¬ 
tion made by the old Klan was that murder and 
rape and barn-burnings and riots were of frequent 
occurrence and the control of the courts by the 
corrupt Union League made it all but impossible 
to bring the offenders to justice. Out of this con¬ 
dition developed the distinctive role of the old 
Klan, namely, that of “a secret cooperative so¬ 
ciety of the nature of a vigilance committee or 
patrol, designed to correct such civil abuses as did 
not come within the purview of the law, or were 
neglected by the officers of the law.” The evi¬ 
dence which shows that the modern Klan, in its 
practical operations in the communities where it 
has been organized, has sought to perpetuate this 
role of 4 ‘a secret cooperative society of the na¬ 
ture of a vigilance committee or patrol” is sim¬ 
ply overwhelming. Following the appearance of 
the Klan the newspapers of Texas recorded some- 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


79 


thing like eighty whippings in the state within a 
year. These were usually visited upon obscure 
and impotent members of the community who were 
moral and social outcasts. Effort at first was made 
to give these Klan activities publicity. A repre¬ 
sentative of the press was directed to be present 
at a certain time on some designated street corner 
after nightfall. He was then whisked away blind¬ 
folded to the place where the whipping was ad¬ 
ministered, and after having witnessed the whip¬ 
ping was returned by auto to the city, blindfolded. 
The places where these whippings occurred were 
located in some cases by means of the fragments 
of bloody shirts and broken suspenders of the vic¬ 
tims. 

The parallel between these whippings adminis¬ 
tered by the revived Klan and the whippings re¬ 
corded in the thirteen volumes of the federal in¬ 
vestigations of the old Klan in 1870-71 is most 
striking. Whipping was the favorite method of 
intimidating the Negro in Reconstruction days, 
the Klan seeking thereby to pry him loose from 
the control of carpet-bagger and radical Repub¬ 
lican. These whippings are found in gruesome 
monotony in the records. There is this funda¬ 
mental difference, however. The old Ku Klux 
who whipped Negroes, and occasionally whites, 


80 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


were terribly in earnest because aroused by a 
sense of unparalleled injustice and misrule. The 
whippings by the revived Klan are prompted 
by no such sense of intolerable wrong or indig¬ 
nation at political misrule. There is reason to 
believe that in many cases these whippings are 
a source of amusement and diversion provided 
by the ‘ 6 strong-arm squad’’ of the local Klan. 
The reports of the behavior of terrified Negroes 
and outcast whites when snatched from their 
homes under cover of night and whisked away 
to some dark wood where they were thoroughly 
thrashed must afford much amusement to these 
secret and self-appointed guardians of public 
morals as they listen to the story from the lips of 
those assigned the task of maintaining 4 4 law and 
order” in the community. It also flatters a per¬ 
verted sense of moral righteousness and social im¬ 
portance. The worst phase of the whole story is 
that these brutal and extra-legal ways of giving 
expression to the moral sense of the community 
often find commendation from such leaders of the 
community as ministers. The deadly moral inertia 
of communities where these outrages are passed 
over with no attempt to vindicate the dignity of 
the law gives us some insight into the mental at¬ 
mosphere that makes the Klan possible. 


81 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 

The Klan authorities have, of course, uniformly 
denied any responsibility for these outrages. 
Owing to the secrecy with which the Klan seeks 
to cover all its acts, it is difficult to prove official 
responsibility. There is, however, evidence, both 
abundant and convincing, to show that in the case 
of local Klans these outrages were committed 
with local Klan sanction. What every self-re¬ 
specting member of the Klan should bear in mind 
is that the organization has acquired a repu¬ 
tation which makes it possible to ascribe to it 
these outrages. If the Klan’s secrecy prevents 
proof in each case of official responsibility, it like¬ 
wise prevents the Klan from vindicating its good 
name. No militant secret order, except under ab¬ 
normal social conditions such as Reconstruction 
in the South, can hope to enjoy the confidence and 
esteem of the best elements in the community. 
The mask is the millstone about the Klan’s neck 
which, unless discarded, will sooner or later drown 
the Klan itself in the sea of hates and suspicions 
which it has created. 

In striving to continue in our present-day so¬ 
ciety the “strong-arm” methods of the old Klan, 
its modern imitator has shown a singular lack of 
historical imagination. The avowed object of the 
old Klan was to overthrow by means of its secret 


82 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


and oath-bound methods the nefarious carpet-bag 
government which, the best citizens felt, had be¬ 
come a menace to the civilization of the South. 
The modern Klan seeks to attain by the methods 
of the old Klan ends which are diametrically op¬ 
posed to the ends sought by the old Klan. The 
modern Klan tells us on every occasion that it 
stands for “law and order,’’ for loyalty to the 
Constitution, for the patriotic support of the ex¬ 
isting government. The modern Klan can not see 
that its mask and parades, its anonymous threat¬ 
ening letters, its childish attempts to intimidate 
its enemies with the mysterious menace of a vast 
Invisible Empire that “sees all and hears all” can 
find no justification in a well-ordered society. 
The modern Klan, judged by its methods, is a 
glaring historic anachronism. The ends it claims 
to seek and the means it uses to attain those ends 
are fundamentally incompatible. The ends are 
“law and order,” and yet the Klan makes use of 
lawlessness and disorder to maintain law and or¬ 
der. The Klan stands for free speech and free 
press, and yet the Klan in actual practice w r ould 
imprison the radical and forbid the Catholic to 
defend his faith or to seek to win America to the 
Catholic faith by a candid presentation of the 
claims of his religion. 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 

VI 


83 


Secrecy played a most important role in the old 
Klan and for reasons that are perfectly obvious. 
The Klan members were threatened with the loss 
of their freedom, their property, their homes, and 
perhaps their lives. Their only safety lay in an 
impenetrable oath-bound secrecy that would pro¬ 
tect them from the corrupt and unscrupulous car¬ 
pet-bag government which controlled the courts 
and the executors of the law. Secrecy was thus 
the very life of the old Ku Klux Klan. The mod¬ 
ern Klan has undoubtedly been led, through its 
imitation of the old Klan, to give to the element of 
secrecy a place of exaggerated importance. Here 
again the Klan has shown a singular lack of his¬ 
torical imagination, for it has failed to see that in 
a free country governed by enlightened public 
opinion secrecy can only be tolerated when it is 
known to be in no wise inimical to public welfare. 
The element of secrecy appears, as is to be ex¬ 
pected, in the multiplication of signs, gestures, 
grips, and passwords. In the oath of allegiance 
the candidate promises to “keep forever sacredly” 
the signs, words, grips, and “other matters of 
knowledge,” and “never divulge the same nor 
even cause to be divulged to any person in the 


84 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


whole world unless I know positively that such a 
person is a member of this order in good and reg¬ 
ular standing and not even then if it be for the 
best interests of the order.” Here it will be ob¬ 
served that secrecy may be used against another 
member of the order if in the judgment of the in¬ 
dividual it is best for the good of the order. The 
candidate swears that he “will never yield to brib¬ 
ery, flattery, threats, passion, punishment, perse¬ 
cution, persuasion, or any enticements whatever 
coming from or offered by any person or persons, 
male or female, for the purpose of obtaining from 
me a secret or secret information of the . . . 
I will die rather than divulge the same, so help 
me God. Amen.” Again in section four w T e read, 
“I swear that I will keep secure to myself a secret 
of a Klansman when same is committed to me in 
the sacred bond of Klansmanship, the crime of 
violating this solemn oath, treason against the 
United States of America, rape, and malicious 
murder alone excepted.” It is, of course, a dubi¬ 
ous ethical procedure to put the violation of the 
oath of a fraternal order on a par with such grave 
crimes as murder, rape, and treason. 

For the purposes for which Emperor Simmons 
repeatedly tells us the Klan was founded, namely, 
fraternity, patriotism, and brotherhood, this oath 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 85 

of strenuous secrecy seems entirely unnecessary. 
Were men engaged in an arduous struggle for the 
maintenance of their civilization, as the men of 
Reconstruction days conceived they were en¬ 
gaged, such an oath might be justifiable, but in 
peaceable, orderly, present-day America such an 
oath is an egregious anachronism. Furthermore, 
there is reason to suspect that this oath has exer¬ 
cised a baneful influence upon the practical work¬ 
ings of the Klan. It has taught Klansmen to 
trust to secrecy and mystery and even intimida¬ 
tion to secure their ends rather than to enlight¬ 
ened and frank expression of opinion. It lends 
justification to concealment within the Klan itself 
so that the sentiment of the Klan as a whole can 
not be brought to bear upon the acts of groups or 
individuals operating behind the mask and robe. 
Finally, this oath has undoubtedly exercised a 
subtle suggestive influence upon Klansmen them¬ 
selves. It has served to convince Klansmen that 
theirs is a militant order with stern duties involv¬ 
ing danger and discomfort. For if the Klans- 
man’s life is not strenuous, why this insistence 
upon keeping everything connected with the Klan 
a deep secret? The psychological effect of this 
upon local Klans has undoubtedly been to encour¬ 
age “strong-arm methods” in their attempts to 


86 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


4 4 clean up’’ the community. The bitter opposition 
these secret methods have aroused among Klan 
opponents has simply confirmed many Klansmen 
in their belief in the heroic knight-errantry of 
their mission. 


vn 

A questionnaire sent out by the writer to de¬ 
termine the reasons for joining the Klan revealed 
an interesting fact. Purity of womanhood as a 
Klan ideal is mentioned only by correspondents 
from the South. It does not occur among the 
Klan objectives mentioned by correspondents 
from the North and West. This fact has at¬ 
tracted the attention of a student of the Klan who 
sees in it evidence of the abnormal sensitiveness 
of Southern society to all matters of sex, due pri¬ 
marily, he thinks, to the racial situation in that 
section (Frank Tannenbaum, “The Ku Klux 
Klan,” The Century , 1923, pp. 873ff.). Mr. Tan¬ 
nenbaum finds evidence here for the existence of 
what he calls a “defense mechanism which some 
Southerners have constructed against loose moral 
standards’ ’ in their relations with colored women. 
‘ ‘ The idealization of the white women in the South 
is thus partly the unconscious self-protection on 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


87 


the part of the white men from their own bad 
habits, notions, beliefs, attitudes and practices.” 
This appeal to Freudianism for an explanation of 
the Southerner’s mental attitude towards woman¬ 
hood is of doubtful value. It is true that the ra¬ 
cial situation of the South does condition the idea 
of Southern womanhood but not in any mysterious 
Freudian sense. The white woman is the citadel 
of the white race’s purity in the South, as in all 
other countries where whites and blacks are 
thrown together. When white women mate freely 
with black men the color line, and with it racial 
integrity, will soon disappear. The recognition 
of this tends naturally to throw around the South¬ 
ern white woman something of a sacrosanct at¬ 
mosphere not to be found in the other sections of 
the country where the race question is not so 
acute. 

It may be seriously doubted, however, whether 
the racial situation has had as much to do with the 
emphasis upon purity of womanhood by the Klan 
in the South as the traditions inherited from the 
Klan of the Reconstruction. This is indicated by 
the following extracts from the diary of Randolph 
Shotwell previously quoted, who states that ‘ ‘ war 
has left so many thousands of widows and de¬ 
fenseless females on isolated plantations” that it 


88 


THE IOJ KLUX KLAN 


became one of the primary duties of the old Klan 
“to shield our women and children from the inso¬ 
lence, rapacity, and brutal passions of vile des¬ 
peradoes, white and black. So well is this under¬ 
stood in the South that you will find but few of 
our noble ladies to-day who do not sympathize 
warmly with the convicted Ku Klux in this prison. 
They do not approve of every act, particularly the 
more violent ones, committed by, or at least attrib¬ 
uted to, the Klan. But they know that its general 
aims were good, and feel indebted to it for a cer¬ 
tain degree of safety which they could not have 
had without it.” This tradition still persists in 
the South. Reference has already been made to 
an extravagant glorification of the old Klan by 
a Southern woman, Mrs. S. E. F. Rose, in her book 
The Ku Klux Klan , “unanimously endorsed by 
the United Daughters of the Confederacy in con¬ 
vention assembled.” 

The continuity of the old and new Klans is fur¬ 
ther evinced by the fact that the old Ku Klux Klan 
traditions have never died out, especially in the 
South. We have seen that owing to the chaotic 
conditions in the South about 1868 the local 
“dens,” either because they did not get the decree 
dissolving the order or because they did not wish 
to see it dissolved, continued to enjoy a casual 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


89 


and independent local existence of their own. 
The Klan tradition persisted and only needed con¬ 
ditions of social strain to give it new life. We 
have had in various sections of the South and else¬ 
where since Reconstruction days the constant re¬ 
currence of disturbances in which “white-caps” 
or “night-riders” have made use of Klan 
methods. In north Georgia, for example, in the 
late eighties and early nineties there arose a 
powerful organization, composed originally of 
moonshiners of the mountains, but gradually de¬ 
veloping into a semi-political secret order, which 
used the disguise and even the name of the Ku 
Klux Klan. They terrorized the country until 
wiped out by the federal authorities. 

Whenever and wherever there are conditions of 
social unrest in the less settled sections of this 
country we find a marked tendency to fall back 
upon the extra-legal methods of securing justice 
of which the old Klan is perhaps the most striking 
example in our national history. Conditions of 
social strain were created by the great war, the 
effects of which emerged in the post-war period 
when the modern Klan started upon its remarkable 
growth. The year 1920, which witnessed the emo¬ 
tional upheaval registered in the vigorous repudia¬ 
tion of Wilson and his League of Nations, was 


90 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


also the year in which the Klan entered upon its 
nation-wide expansion. The time was ripe for a 
revival of the old Klan, the traditions of which 
had never ceased to exist in more or less spo¬ 
radic form, especially in the South. 

The outstanding characteristic of the old Klan 
in its degenerate stage, the trait likewise charac¬ 
teristic of the sporadic revivals of Klan traditions 
since Reconstruction and emerging again in the 
modern Klan, is the lawless self-sufficiency of the 
local Klan or organization. Each “den” of the 
old disbanded Klan became a law unto itself. 
Hence the “outrages” of the old Klan, hence the 
menace of the sporadic revivals of the Klan tradi¬ 
tions since Reconstruction, and hence the funda¬ 
mental weakness of the modern Klan. | The story 
of the Mer Rouge tragedy in northern Louisiana, 
which finds parallels in many other sections 
where the local Klan has taken matters into 
its own hands, indicates that the modern Klan is 
structurally weak in that it does not have, and 
from the nature of its secret methods can not have, 
any effective control of local Klans by the central 
authorities. The Klan is thus essentially and 
inherently a lawless organization. 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


91 


VIII 

The history of the old Klan finds another paral¬ 
lel in that of the modern Klan; both have been 
opposed by the most intelligent members of the 
community. It is a mistake to suppose that the 
old Klan enjoyed the unanimous sanction of all 
members of the Southern communities suffering 
from Negro rule in Reconstruction days. Robert 
W. Shand, a prominent lawyer of Unionville, 
South Carolina, writing under the pseudonym 
“Brutus’’ in the Weekly Union Times for July 
17th, 1871, states: “There are some erroneous 
opinions entertained as to the feelings of the peo¬ 
ple of Upper South Carolina towards the Ku 
Klux. They are not a band of cut-throats and 
desperadoes, as some suppose; nor, on the other 
hand, are they universally approved by the white 
people here. They are men of firmness and nerve 
who strike because they believe it is necessary for 
the protection of their life, property and liberty; 
they strike at night because circumstances render 
it imperative. But very many citizens disapprove 
and condemn the acts of violence committed by 
the Klan. We feel the oppression of the present 
state government but we would not have it over¬ 
turned by violence. ... We are no apologists for 


92 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


the Ku Klux. Nothing here written is an apology. 
The reader who so construes this letter finds ex¬ 
cuse sufficient in what we have enumerated sim¬ 
ply as crnses . We can not excuse the self-consti¬ 
tuted avengers of white men’s wrongs. Crime be¬ 
gets crime but does not excuse it. To kill a man 
is murder. To be prosecutor, judge, jury, and 
sheriff is a fearful sin—a sin legally and morally 
and a sin in His eyes to whom belongeth ven¬ 
geance. We may have no justice but it is better to 
suffer and wait. A bad government is better than 
no government at all. Injustice is better than 
anarchy.” In an editorial comment on this letter 
the Weekly Union Times says, ‘ 4 Nine out of every 
ten who read Brutus’ letter will cordially endorse, 
its sentiments and truthfulness.” 

Just as in the case of the old Klan, there is in 
every community where the modern Klan is ac¬ 
tive a minority who oppose it. An analysis of 
this minority is most suggestive. In general, 
those of independent mind are opposed to the 
Klan. There is little doubt that ex-Senator Le- 
Roy Percy of Greenville, Mississippi, is correct 
when he states , i 1 The thinking element of the com¬ 
munity is against the Klan.” The following 
statement from a prominent clergyman of Geor- 


THE SHADOW OF THE PAST 


93 


gia is typical of the attitude of the independent- 
minded ministers: ‘ ‘ The Klan is a useless organi¬ 
zation and will serve no particular purpose. By 
the best citizens it seems to be looked upon with 
disfavor and some have been prompt and vehe¬ 
ment in denying that they have ever belonged to 
it.” In the city of Atlanta the Klan is looked 
upon with disfavor by the liberal-minded and 
progressive clergy and they seem to have the sup¬ 
port of their churches. It is unfortunate that they 
have not seen fit to voice their condemnation. The 
Klan is opposed by eighty-five percent of the 
newspapers and for obvious reasons. The news¬ 
paper exists to provide publicity, and its useful¬ 
ness, even its very existence, is menaced by the 
secret methods of the Klan. The hankers are 
generally opposed to the Klan. Where hankers 
have made the mistake of identifying themselves 
with the Klan economic pressure from Catholics 
and Jews has often forced them to resign from 
the Klan. Members of the bar, especially judges, 
are generally opposed to the Klan for they recog¬ 
nize in its extra-legal methods of attaining justice 
a distinct danger to the dignity and efficiency of 
the law. Many members of these various groups, 
who at first identified themselves with the Klan 


94 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


and afterwards resigned, are to be found in every 
community. Not so much tbe number as the char¬ 
acter of these men constitutes their importance. 
Their attitude provides a most convincing argu¬ 
ment against the Klan. 


CHAPTER IV 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 

The student of the Klan finds some curious para¬ 
doxes in the solution of which he is apt to go amiss 
unless he takes into consideration the mental 
processes of the Americans of the old native stock 
who compose the rank and file of the Klan mem¬ 
bership. To read the newspaper accounts of al¬ 
leged Klan outrages, such as the Mer Rouge mur¬ 
ders, the whippings of Texas, the secret proscrip¬ 
tion of American citizens, the un-Christian ar¬ 
raignment of Catholics and Jews by Klan preach¬ 
ers, the childish mummeries of hood and gown, 
the spectacular initiations in the light of blazing 
torches, and the solemn nightly parades in the 
presence of gaping thousands of mystery-loving 
Americans—to read of these and to listen to the 
arraignments of the Klan by its enemies inclines 
one to feel that the members of this order are a 
curious combination of ferocious cruelty, cowardly 
vindictiveness, superstitious ignorance, and re¬ 
ligious bigotry. On the other hand, when one 


96 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

converses with the members of the Klan, as the 
writer has done, he finds them to be conventional 
Americans, thoroughly human, kind fathers and 
husbands, hospitable to the stranger, devout in 
their worship of God, loyal to state and nation, 
and including in many instances the best citizens 
of the community. What is the explanation of the 
apparent contradiction? The explanation, in so 
far as there is any explanation of the hodgepodge 
of hopes and fears, of lofty ideals and brutish 
passions which we call human nature, is to be 
found in the psychology of that element in our 
population that is attracted by the Klan. 

i 

By a process of elimination it is possible to de- 
markate with a fair degree of accuracy the gen¬ 
eral class from which the Klan draws its mem¬ 
bers. The twenty millions of Catholics, the 
twelve millions of Negroes, the two millions and 
more of Jews, and the twenty millions of foreign- 
born are automatically excluded from member¬ 
ship by the Klan constitution. Organized labor is 
not in sympathy with the Klan. The American 
Federation of Labor at its convention in Cincin¬ 
nati, June 12-24, 1922, “unanimously adopted’’ 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 97 


the following report: “Your committee is of the 
opinion that the American Federation of Labor 
should not assume to endorse or condemn any or¬ 
ganization, fraternity, or association of American 
citizens unless the purpose of such organization is 
to organize for the purpose of interfering with 
the rights, opportunities and liberties of wage 
earners. Your committee is firmly of the opinion 
that the administration of the law is vested solely 
and entirely in the duly elected and appointed of¬ 
ficers of the law, and that those who as members 
of any secret organization assume to usurp the 
functions properly belonging to legal authorities, 
invite mob-rule and create in men’s minds a dis¬ 
respect for and a disregard of duly constituted 
authority. Your committee is also of the opinion 
that it is not conducive to government by law and 
the maintenance of peaceful and safe conditions 
in the community to have members of any organi¬ 
zation pa?ade the streets so disguised that their 
identity can not be discovered when such disguises 
are adopted for the purpose of inspiring the 
thought or belief that the disguised individuals 
represent an invisible government.” The Klan, 
as might be expected from its policy of oppor¬ 
tunism, has on occasion, as in Kansas when it 
seemed to further Klan interests, championed the 


98 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

cause of labor. But there is little in common be¬ 
tween Klan doctrines and those of organized la¬ 
bor. The average Klansman is far more in sym¬ 
pathy with capital than with labor. There are 
sporadic instances of workers, generally skilled 
workers, identifying themselves with the Klan, 
but the Klan has made no great inroad upon la¬ 
bor, skilled or unskilled. 

Mr. James R. Howard, president of the Ameri¬ 
can Farm Bureau Federation, “an organization 
of more than a million farmers,” states: “My 
work has taken me into every section of the coun¬ 
try and given me exceedingly broad contacts with 
representatives of all industrial and commercial 
organizations as well as agricultural. I have yet 
to come in contact with the first trace of Ku 
Klux Klanism and have never heard mention or 
reference to it except through the press.” This 
rather remarkable statement from one enjoying 
unrivalled opportunities for observation among 
the farming population would seem to indicate 
that the Klan has no great hold upon the farmer. 
There are undoubtedly many farmers who are 
members of the Klan. Local Klans have been or¬ 
ganized in the agricultural communities in vari¬ 
ous Southern states and presumably in the North 
and West. There is every reason to believe, how- 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 99 

ever, that this great reservoir of native Ameri¬ 
canism, which has very real affiliations with the 
Elan, has never been exploited. The explanation 
lies not in antagonism to the Klan, hut rather in 
the natural difficulties of maintaining effective 
Klan organization in the country. The Klan is 
essentially a village and small-town organization. 
Neither the great city with its hodgepodge of 
races and groups nor the country with its isola¬ 
tion lends itself to effective Klan organization. 

It would seem, then, that the Klan draws its 
members chiefly from the descendants of the old 
American stock living in the villages and small 
towns of those sections of the country where this 
old stock has been least disturbed by immigration, 
on the one hand, and the disruptive effect of in¬ 
dustrialism, on the other. As is to be expected, 
therefore, we find the Klan fairly strong in the 
South, where the percentage of the old American 
stock is highest and where it has been left in un¬ 
disturbed possession of its traditions, in parts of 
the Middle West, and in states like Oregon. 

By far the majority of the native whites of the 
South are the descendants of the Scotch-Irish 
who came to America in two great streams during 
the eighteenth century, one stream striking in 
through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, crossing 


100 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


the Alleghenies and following down the Ohio, the 
other coming in through the Carolinas and the 
Valley of Virginia and providing the pioneers 
who opened up the South and Southwest. This 
poor white Scotch-Irish stock in the South lived 
a more or less submerged existence during the 
slavery regime. Towards the close of the last 
century they suddenly awoke to a sense of their 
power. Under the leadership of such politicians 
as Tilman of South Carolina, Vardaman of Mis¬ 
sissippi, Jeff Davis of Arkansas, and Tom Wat¬ 
son of Georgia they made themselves the politi¬ 
cal masters of the South as they had already 
dominated that section religiously and morally. 

To understand the spread of the Klan in the 
South one must understand the mental attitudes 
of this old Scotch-Irish stock in Southern society. 
They are intensely Protestant. Originally Pres¬ 
byterians, they are now for the most part mem¬ 
bers of the Baptist and Methodist communions. 
The Baptists, the most numerous denomination in 
the South, with a membership of three and one half 
millions, are apparently the religious mainstay of 
the Klan. It is probable that the majority of 
the Baptist ministers in the small towns and coun¬ 
tryside are either secretly or openly sympathetic 
with the Klan. The Klud, or official chaplain of 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 101 


the Klan, Rev. Caleb Ridley, was a member of the 
Baptist Association of Atlanta. From their Pres¬ 
byterian ancestry these Scotch-Irish have inher¬ 
ited the most intense and unreasoning antipathy 
to the Roman Catholic Church. This antipathy 
often makes itself felt in communities where the 
Catholics are in a hopeless minority, as in Georgia 
where they number at most only a few thousand. 

As in few other sections of the country, the old 
native American stock of the South is often the 
victim of its own noble but uncritical and pas¬ 
sionate loyalties. The Southern voter is prone to 
accept uncritically all forms of half-baked radi¬ 
calism in politics bearing the label of the orthodox 
Democratic party, such as the Sub-Treasury 
scheme, Free Silver, and Populism. A beautiful 
but unreasoning loyalty to orthodox Protestantism 
induces Southern Protestants to swallow with the 
same uncritical avidity the crude ejaculations of 
Mr. Bryan and the Fundamentalists against Evo¬ 
lution and Modernism in religion. It is this mental 
background with its provincial fear of all things 
foreign and its uncritical but loyal Americanism 
which we must presuppose in order to understand 
the sympathetic reception of the following utter¬ 
ance of Emperor Simmons in an address to the 
Junior Order of United Mechanics in Atlanta, 


102 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


April 30th, 1923: “My friends, your government 
can be changed between the rising and the setting 
of one sun. This great nation with all it provides 
can be snatched away from you in the space of one 
day. . . . When the hordes of aliens walk to the 
ballot box and their votes outnumber yours, then 
that alien horde has got you by the throat. . . . 
Americans will awake from their slumber and rush 
out to battle and there will be such stir as the 
world has never seen the like. The soil of America 
will run with the blood of its people.” 

It would be a gross injustice to the South to 
imagine, however, that the prejudices and fears 
appealed to by Klan leaders are entertained by 
all members of the community. The intelligentsia 
of the South, as of other sections, are opposed to 
the Klan, though they are, of course, a very 
small minority. There are men of independent 
mind in every Southern state who have spoken 
out in no uncertain terms against the Klan, such 
as ex-Senator LeRoy Percy of Greenville, Missis¬ 
sippi, Mr. Melville Foster of the Houston Chron¬ 
icle, Rev. Ashby Jones, the eloquent Baptist min¬ 
ister of Atlanta. In every hamlet there are ear¬ 
nest and thoughtful men and women who are 
opposed to the Klan. Almost without exception 
the leaders in the various professions and in busi- 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 103 

ness are not in sympathy with the Klan. The 
strength of the Klan lies in that large, well-mean¬ 
ing but more or less ignorant and unthinking 
middle class, whose inflexible loyalty has pre¬ 
served with uncritical fidelity the traditions of the 
original American stock. This class is perhaps 
more in evidence in the South than in any other 
section of the country. The Klan leaders have 
been able to play upon their prejudices and un¬ 
reasoned loyalties with success exactly for the 
same reasons that these loyalties have been ma¬ 
nipulated by political spellbinders such as Varda- 
man, Tom Watson, and Bryan. The most danger¬ 
ous weakness in a democracy is the uninformed 
and unthinking average man. 

n 

The Klan, however, appeals to other sections 
as well as to the South. What are the psycho¬ 
logical factors, common to the mind of America 
as a whole, which have paved the way for the 
national expansion of the Klan? The original 
Klan, as we have seen, was organized by a group 
of young men in the little village of Pulaski, 
Tennessee, who had recently returned from the 
war and found time hanging heavy on their hands. 


104 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


This organization with its mysterious signs, its 
queer name, its fantastic costume, and its ritual 
offered some relief from the deadly monotony of 
small town life. The same psychological need for 
escape from the drabness of village and small 
town life plays no small part in the appeal of the 
modern Klan to the average American. Sinclair 
Lewis has portrayed for us in Main Street the mo¬ 
notony of existence in the small town of the Mid¬ 
dle West. In his later story, Babbitt , he sketched 
with the pen of a master the business man of 
native American stock caught in the grip of tra¬ 
ditional, unrefleetive, and uninspiring one-hun¬ 
dred-percent Americanism. To this large group 
the appeal of the Klan is almost irresistible. It 
falls in entirely with their traditional American¬ 
ism while offering at the same time through its 
mystery a means of escape from the wearisome 
monotony of their daily round. Its cheap moral 
idealism fills a need not met by business or social 
and civic life. 

The dreariness of small-town life in the Middle 
West analyzed so skilfully by Sinclair Lewis ex¬ 
ists, perhaps, in even greater intensity, in that 
vast area stretching from the straggling foothills 
of the Blue Ridge Mountains across central and 
southern Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, northern 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 105 


Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. 
There are parts of this region, such as northern 
Louisiana, eastern Texas, Arkansas, and Okla¬ 
homa, which for drabness and deadly monotony at 
the higher spiritual and intellectual levels are 
hardly to be paralleled anywhere else in America. 
The poverty of soul is brought out in all the more 
ghastly distinctness by the hectic activity in the 
accumulation of wealth through the exploitation 
of oil fields or otherwise. Here the followers of 
Mr. Bryan manifest their passionate devotion to 
science by prying loose from their chairs profes¬ 
sors in the state universities who teach evolution. 
Here the Fundamentalists, the defenders of evan¬ 
gelical orthodoxy, seek to win the eternal com¬ 
mendation of God by unfrocking the minister who 
impeaches Moses ’s claim to the authorship of the 
Pentateuch. Here the dweller in the small town 
and countryside follows the monotonous and un¬ 
imaginative round of his nights and days un¬ 
touched by the beauty and mystery of life. At the 
higher levels of religion and morals he is tyran¬ 
nized over by the Puritanical precepts of an ortho¬ 
dox Protestantism which places a premium upon 
the mental servility of “simple” faith, taboos 
forms of worldly amusements without troubling 
to find a substitute, and dooms its devotees to a 


106 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


life spent in the midst of spiritual and moral il¬ 
lusions. A keen critic of American life has re¬ 
marked that conventional Protestantism, still by 
far the most powerful factor in the higher life of 
Americans, il hides the edges of the sea of life 
with a hoard-walk of ethical concepts and sits 
thereon, hoping that no one will hear the thunder 
of the surf of human passions on the rocks be¬ 
low.” 

It was in this great southwestern area dominated 
by orthodox Protestantism that the Klan reached 
its first peak of success. To understand its re¬ 
markable spread we must enter sympathetically 
into the life of the people. We must realize the 
appeal of its mystery to imaginations starved by 
a prosaic and unpoetic environment. We must 
try to feel as they feel the dramatic interest 
aroused by the weird costumes, the spectacular 
initiations beneath the glare of fiery torches, the 
nightly parades through quiet hamlets where men 
and women gather from far and near to gaze on 
this strange apparition. The mayor of a small 
Texas town, describing to the writer the attitude 
of the thousands gathered to witness a Klan pa¬ 
rade, stated that as the mysterious cavalcade filed 
silently down the street, hooded and sheeted, bear¬ 
ing a fiery cross at its head, one could almost hear 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 107 


the breathing of the crowd. Here was something 
that broke the deadly monotony of their days, 
that symbolized the uncharted realm of an In¬ 
visible Empire, that fascinated by its appeal to 
the supernal. The effect was much like that pro¬ 
duced upon the villagers of South Germany or 
Italy when on certain religious occasions the 
image of a patron saint is borne through the 
streets to the solemn chant of monks and the odor 
of swinging censers. The Klan has learned, as its 
inveterate enemy, the Roman Catholic Church, 
learned long ago, the power of the appeal to the 
spectacular and the mysterious. 

The Klan makes a powerful appeal to the petty 
impotence of the small-town mind. A close ob¬ 
server of the Klan from Texas makes the follow¬ 
ing suggestive remark: 44 There is a great ‘infe¬ 
riority complex’ on the part of the Klan member¬ 
ship—due in part to lack of education—Dallas 
and Fort Worth (where the Klan is especially 
strong) being largely populated by men and 
women reared in obscure towns and country places 
where public schools are short-termed and 
scarce.” Here we have a curious side-light upon 
the psychology of the average man of native 
American stock who fills the ranks of the Klan. 
He is tossed about in the hurly-burly of our in- 


108 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


dustrial and so-called democratic society. Under 
the stress and strain of social competition he is 
made to realize his essential mediocrity. Yet ac¬ 
cording to traditional democratic doctrine he is 
born free and the equal of his fellow who is outdis¬ 
tancing him in the race. Here is a large and 
powerful organization offering to solace his sense 
of defeat by dubbing him a knight of the Invisi¬ 
ble Empire for the small sum of ten dollars. 
Surely knighthood was never offered at such a 
bargain! He joins. He becomes the chosen con¬ 
servator of American ideals, the keeper of the 
morals of the community. He receives the label 
of approved “one hundred percent American¬ 
ism.” The Klan slogan printed on the outside 
of its literature is 4 ‘ an urgent call for men.* ’ This 
flatters the pride of the man suffering from the 
sense of mediocrity and defeat. It stimulates his 
latent idealism. It offers fantastic possibilities 
for his dwarfed and starved personality. Mem¬ 
bership in a vast mysterious empire that “sees 
all and hears all ,, means a sort of mystic glorifi¬ 
cation of his petty self. It identifies his own weak 
incompetent will with the omnipotent and uni¬ 
versal will of a great organization. The appeal 
is irresistible. There are of course others who 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 109 


see in this secret and powerful organization op¬ 
portunities for gratifying individual ambition. 
Strong but unscrupulous men have availed them¬ 
selves of the Klan to attain their selfish ends. On 
the whole, however, the high-minded and inde¬ 
pendent members of the community do not identi¬ 
fy themselves with the Klan. It is a refuge for 
mediocre men, if not for weaklings, and for obvi¬ 
ous reasons. 


m 

One finds on every page of Klan literature an 
insistent, imperative, and even intolerant demand 
for like-mindedness. It is, of course, the beliefs 
and traditions of the old native American stock 
that are to provide the basis for this like-minded¬ 
ness. The Catholic is free to entertain his own 
ideas in religion but he must feel, think, and act 
in terms of pure and unadulterated Americanism. 
The foreign-born member of the community is 
tolerated only on the presupposition that he learns 
the American tongue, adopts the American dress 
and conventionalities, in a word assimilates as 
quickly and thoroughly as possible the traditions 
of the old American stock. The eternal quarrel 


110 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


of the Klan with the Jew and the Negro is that 
mental and physical differences seem to have 
conspired to place them in groups entirely to 
themselves so that it becomes to all intents and 
purposes impossible for them to attain with any¬ 
thing like completeness this like-mindedness syn¬ 
onymous with one hundred percent Americanism. 
The Negro is granted a place in American society 
only upon his willingness to accept a subordinate 
position, for one hundred percent Americanism 
means white supremacy. The Jew is tolerated^ 
largely because native Americanism can not help 
itself. The Jew is disliked because of the amazing 
tenacity with which he resists absolute American¬ 
ization, a dislike that is not unmingled with fear; 
the Negro is disliked because he is considered es¬ 
sentially an alien and unassimilable element in 
society. 

Back of the Klan’s insistence upon like-mind¬ 
edness there is, to be sure, a measure of demo¬ 
cratic common sense. If there is to be any sort 
of effective and intelligent social cooperation a 
measure of agreement upon fundamentals is neces¬ 
sary. Within the social order, to be sure, there 
will always be group and class differences. These 
differences may be made a most valuable means of 
cultivating a vigorous and enlightened citizenship. 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 111 


It is a peculiarity of human thinking that truth 
is far more apt to emerge where we discuss our 
differences than where we emphasize our agree¬ 
ments. It is only when these differences cut so 
deeply that they threaten the integrity of the so¬ 
cial tissue that they become dangerous. To play 
the game of citizenship successfully there must be 
a punctilious regard for the “ rules of the game” 
that all contestants have agreed to observe. 
The Klan belongs to the crop of patriotic or¬ 
ganizations that sprang up during and after the 
war and have for their general object the preser¬ 
vation of that measure of like-mindedness which 
was felt to be absolutely necessary not only for 
the prosecution of the immediate task of winning 
the war but also for coping successfully with the 
welter of problems created by the war. To this 
extent the Klan undoubtedly represents the nat¬ 
ural reaction of conservative Americans against 
the perils of revolutionary and un-American ideas. 
It is a militant attempt to secure team-work in 
national life. 

Back of the Klan’s crude insistence upon like- 
mindedness, however, there is much shallow and 
superficial thinking. To the average Klansman 
what appears on the surface of things to be alike 
is alike, what appears unlike is unlike. The acci- 


112 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

dent of a black skin is made an excuse for de¬ 
barring from the charmed circles of one hundred 
percent Americanism a man who may be, in spite 
of his Negro blood, intensely, intelligently, and 
patriotically American. On the other hand, a man 
with the external earmarks of the old American 
stock is accepted uncritically as a one hundred 
percent American. All the Klan asks is a super¬ 
ficial conformity. For the average Klansman, ap¬ 
parently, one hundred percent Americanism is 
often identified with the crude and unreasoned 
emotional enthusiasms that are excited by external 
symbols such as the flag, the soldier’s uniform, or 
the words of the Declaration of Independence. 
There is reason to believe that, just as the primi¬ 
tive savage creates for himself a grotesque image 
of his enemy, sticks his dagger into it, and ima¬ 
gines that he has thereby done his enemy to death, 
so many members of the Klan create a mental 
image of the Pope that in actual reality bears lit¬ 
tle or no resemblance to that reverend gentleman, 
and then proceed to belabor this mental fiction 
with fierce un-Christian invectives. A child whip¬ 
ping its contumacious dolly is hardly more irra¬ 
tional. 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 113 


IV 

The mental attitudes emphasized by the Klan 
under the labels of one hundred percent Ameri¬ 
canism, anti-Catholicism, and the like, consist for 
the most part of a set of external and factitious 
mental symbols that often have little or no cor¬ 
respondence with reality. The Klansman, like the 
mass of average Americans, lives and moves in a 
world of mental stereotypes . 1 In his famous 
allegory of the cave Plato says: “Behold! human 
beings living in a sort of underground den, which 
has a mouth open towards the light and reaching 
all across the den; they have been here from their 
childhood, and have their legs and necks chained 
so that they can not move, and can only see be¬ 
fore them; for the chains are arranged in such 
manner as to prevent them from turning around 
their heads. At a distance above and behind them 
the light of a fire is blazing, and between the fire 
and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you 
will see if you look a low wall built along the way, 
like the screen which marionette players have be¬ 
fore them, over which they show the puppets.’’ 
As men and animals walk along the wall their 
shadows are projected by the fire upon the back 

i See Walter Lippmann’a Public Opinion. 


114 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


wall of tlie cave so that the men chained in the 
cave “see only their own shadows or the shadows 
of one another which the fire throws upon the op¬ 
posite wall of the cave.” This famous figure of 
the old Greek sage describes in poetic form the 
mental conditions under which the majority of 
men live. It is a shadow world composed of 
mental pictures of external reality. If these pic¬ 
tures are false their world is unreal; if true their 
world is real. 

Plato’s famous allegory of the cave falls short 
in one very important particular. The mental 
pictures by which we represent the external world 
are not pictures that are projected mechanically 
upon the moving-picture screen of our souls. 
They are in reality outgrowths of experience, 
artifacts that are created by social contacts in 
family, church, club, party, class, nation, race. 
Darwin or the Pope exist and take on practical 
significance mainly as sectarian artifacts. That 
is to say, the mental pictures that stand for the 
real personal head of the Church of Rome vary in 
pronounced fashion according as the Pope is 
imagined by a Baptist Klansman of Georgia, a 
Unitarian of Back Bay, Boston, or an Irish Catho¬ 
lic of Cork. Similarly, the Darwin damned by 
Georgia Baptist or admired by Boston Unitarian 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 115 


is to all intents and purposes in each case an arti¬ 
fact, that is to say, a more or less artificial mental 
symbol which has slowly taken shape under the 
pressure of family, church, school, and commu¬ 
nity so that each particular mental picture of 
Darwin, the product of different local conditions, 
stands in the thought and life of each of these in¬ 
dividuals for the actual historic Darwin. 

Men and women act upon the assumption that 
these mental symbols or artifacts by which they 
picture to themselves the world actually corres¬ 
pond with the utmost fidelity to reality. That is 
to say, they identify their ideas of men and things 
with the absolute truth as to men and things. 
There are tens of thousands of devout Klansmen 
of the South and Middle West who have built up, 
under the tutelage of orthodox pastors and such 
intellectual leaders as Mr. Bryan, certain mental 
pictures with regard to the Pope or evolution. 
They act upon the assumption that these mental 
pictures actually correspond to the ultimate facts. 
They conclude that the Roman Catholic Church is 
subversive of all true Americanism and hostile 
to the national educational ideal. Acting upon 
this assumption, they bring pressure to bear upon 
their legislatures, as in Oregon, to eliminate the 
Catholic parochial schools. These mental pic- 


116 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


tures have all the practical implications in con¬ 
duct, therefore, of actual reality. The seriousness 
with which men take their mental pictures, the 
bewildering fashion in which these mental pictures 
vary from group to group and the appalling dif¬ 
ficulty we meet when we try to reconcile all these 
various mental pictures or seek to bring them into 
some sort of harmony with the actual facts, all 
combine to give us some insight into the exas¬ 
perating difficulties that beset the problem of ra¬ 
tional social control. The problem of the Klan 
is the problem of stubborn, uncritical mental 
stereotypes. 

Obviously the world of immediate practical im¬ 
portance for the student of society is this world 
of mental artifacts, the pictured world that men 
carry around in their heads. This pictured world 
tends to take the place of the real world for all 
of us, Catholic and Protestant, scientist and rus¬ 
tic, Klansman and anti-Klansman. We adjust our 
conduct to fixed mental pictures of men and things 
or “mental stereotypes,” as Walter Lippmann 
calls them in his suggestive book, Public Opinion . 
Men fight and die for their fictive mental worlds. 
In the early days of the Christian Church long¬ 
shoremen in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, gave 
each other bloody ndjtes over the question as to 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 117 

whether Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, 
was of the same or like substance with the Father, 
the first person of the Trinity. Men have lost their 
reason brooding over the mental picture of a per¬ 
sonal devil or the pangs of eternal torment in hell 
fire. Thousands of the members of the Klan have 
stereotyped conceptions of all foreigners as Bol¬ 
shevists, of labor unions as socialistic, of men with 
black skins as essentially inferior to men with 
white skins, of the Pope as the anti-Christ of the 
book of Revelation, and of every Catholic as an 
actual or potential traitor to his country. The 
vast majority of these good people have never 
taken the trouble to criticize these mental stereo¬ 
types. They took them over from their heritage 
of conventional American traditions much as the 
chameleon takes on the color of the green leaf 
upon which it rests. Any one who dared suggest 
to the average Klansman that his mental stereo¬ 
types as to the Pope, the Constitution, the Jew, 
or white supremacy were merely ways of looking 
at things with no special claim to trustworthiness 
would be considered a very uncomfortable indi¬ 
vidual or else a candidate for the lunatic asylum. 

Much might be said in defense of stereotypes as 
part of our mental furniture. They are useful in 
that they are economical. ^Each stereotype may 


118 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


be looked upon as coin current, struck out of the 
crude ore of social experience. We use these 
stereotypes because they spare us the trouble of 
going through all the experience of the past that 
is crystallized and condensed into a mental stereo¬ 
type. Think of all the mental wear and tear the 
average man is saved by the mental stereotypes 
struck out for him in radical, socialist, atheist, 
Bolshevist, higher criticism, evolution, white su¬ 
premacy, democracy, the divinity of Jesus, pu¬ 
rity of womanhood, free speech, or one hundred 
percent Americanism. These stereotypes are pas¬ 
sively assimilated by the child in the home, the 
church, the school, the community. They literally 
close down upon the child’s budding mental life 
and shape it as the molds shape the potter’s clay. 
These stereotypes economize time and mental 
energy for the individual but they permit him to 
see things only from their fixed predetermined 
angle. What opportunity, for example, has the 
child reared in an orthodox Protestant home for 
gaining any true historical appreciation of the 
Pope, Jesus of Nazareth, the Devil, or Voltaire? 
The very definiteness, the fixity and finality of 
those mental stereotypes called Fundamentalist 
theology, ought to arouse all the more serious mis¬ 
givings as to their trustworthiness as infallible 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 119 
guides through that vast and uncharted realm of 
God and sin and heaven and hell. 

Since we must have stereotypes and since they 
are a manifest source of danger to the integrity 
of our mental lives it would appear that the only 
wise course is to use our stereotypes with the con¬ 
stant realization of the fact that they are after 
all merely mental pictures. This would imply 
more or less of a critical attitude towards the 
pictures we carry around in our heads about men 
and things. It would emancipate us from the 
tyranny of the stereotyped attitudes that we in¬ 
herit in religion, politics, business, and morals. 
As an inevitable result of this critical attitude men 
would be inclined to he more tolerant of those 
who differ with them. For, after all, differences 
between Catholic and Protestant, native Ameri¬ 
can and foreigner, laborer and capitalist, resolve 
themselves back into stereotypes that are indige¬ 
nous to each group or class and which the mem¬ 
ber of that class has absorbed under the convic¬ 
tion that they are ultimate and absolute truth. If 
we approach our stereotypes in this critical and 
tolerant attitude their use will be found to be 
thoroughly justifiable and even indispensable. 
But our stereotypes should at all times be our 
mental servants and never our intellectual tyrants. 


120 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


The man who surrenders abjectly to the mental 
stereotypes of his church, party, business,' com¬ 
munity, nation, or race permits himself to be 
branded like a sheep and should realize that in 
time like a sheep he will either be sheared or 
slaughtered. 


v 

Last but not least in our analysis of the Klan 
psychology comes the part played by the feelings 
aroused by the war. We all feel strongly about 
all matters which we consider of vital importance. 
Religion, for example, which has to do with the 
supreme values of life, arouses the noblest enthu¬ 
siasms of men. Those sentiments built up around 
country, church, home, are always strongly tinged 
with emotion because they deal with important 
segments of our lives. When the course of our 
lives runs smoothly these emotions are not 
strongly in evidence for the simple reason that 
situations are lacking which call them into play. 
A mother’s love for her child is most in evidence 
when the child is in danger. The ecclesiastic’s 
love for his church is most in evidence when he 
thinks its doctrines are menaced. The patriot’s 
love for his country is most in evidence when it is 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 121 


endangered by war. That is to say, all disturbed 
social situations such as those created by war or 
revolution are always situations in which the at¬ 
mosphere is tense with emotions. It follows, there¬ 
fore, that periods of profound disturbance, times 
when the very foundations of society are shaken, 
when men feel themselves in danger of losing 
their grip upon fundamental loyalties, when the 
pole-stars are being blotted from their skies in re¬ 
ligion, politics, or morals, are the periods in the 
history of society when men are more apt to be 
guided by their feelings than by reason. For it is 
then that our vague emotional attitudes usually 
organized and rationalized by a fixed framework 
of ideas, as in authoritative creeds or established 
ways of life, are set free, precipitated as it were 
in the social solution, because the normal setting 
in which these emotions function is destroyed or 
seriously deranged. 

The Klan, though organized in 1915, owes its 
marvellous growth to the disturbed post-war con¬ 
ditions. The war, with its hymns of hate, its sto¬ 
ries of poison gas and human carnage, its secret; 
spyings upon fellow Americans, its accounts of 
Belgian atrocities, its imprisonment of radicals, 
its fearful tales of Bolshevist designs upon Ameri¬ 
can institutions, had opened up the fountains of 


122 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

the great deep of national feeling. After the 
armistice these hates kindled by the war and to 
which the nation had become habituated during 
years of bloodshed were suddenly set adrift be¬ 
cause stripped of the objects and the ends around 
which they had been organized by the experi¬ 
ence of the war. As a nation we had cultivated 
a taste for the cruel, the brutal, the intoler¬ 
ant, and the un-Christian that demanded gratifi¬ 
cation. Here was an unparalleled opportunity 
for the Klan “salesmen of hate.” The Klan of¬ 
fered just what the war-torn distraught emotions 
of the nation demanded. 

The Klan has literally battened upon the ir¬ 
rational fear psychology that followed on the 
heels of the war. The Klan’s first move in the 
South was to capitalize the white’s fear of the 
Negro owing to the Negro’s new ambitions cre¬ 
ated by his fight for democracy and the increased 
demands for his labor. To-day, for various 
reasons, the Negro is a negligible quantity in the 
Klan issue South or North. The center of the 
fear psychology has been shifted even in the South 
from the Negro to the Catholic, the Jew, and the 
foreigner. What keeps the Klan alive in the face 
of powerful opposition and its patent incompati¬ 
bility with the principles of true Americanism is 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 123 

undoubtedly a widespread distrust of all things 
foreign. 

The peak of this wave of antagonism to all 
things foreign was reached in 1920 when the Klan 
began to grow by leaps and bounds. This fear 
of alien influence did much to defeat the strenu¬ 
ous efforts during the campaign of 1920 to induce 
this country to become a member of the League of 
Nations. The campaign itself was one dominated 
not so much by reason and the genuine merits of 
the issue as by blind emotions. The leaders of the 
opposition to Wilson’s policies often strengthened 
these fears by demagogic appeals to the fear of 
entangling foreign alliances ingrained in the 
average American. The defeat of Wilson and his 
League was mainly the result of an emotional 
upheaval. It was the product of a fear psychology 
not unmixed with more unworthy emotions. 

This fear psychology has registered itself in a 
radical and apparently irrational change in our 
immigration policy. Almost half a century ago 
writers and investigators had been asserting that 
the native American was voluntarily eliminating 
himself and his descendants by his immigration 
policy. Sober statistics have long been available 
to show that through its immigration policy the 
nation has been assiduously creating a situation 


12 4 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


by which in time the reins of power, politically, 
economically, and religiously, would pass from the 
scions of the old stock to the children of the alien. 
But the politicians jockeyed for spoils and power 
and the native American chased the dollar while 
millions of alien and often inferior stock flooded 
our shores. Suddenly, almost over night, Congress 
passed a law which for its drastic modification of 
policy is perhaps without a parallel in our politi¬ 
cal history. Here we have the result not of sober 
reason nor of a well-matured and thought-out na¬ 
tional policy but of fear psychology. The immense 
popularity of this drastic immigration law with 
the masses of Americans should throw some light 
for us upon the readiness with which men listen to 
the Klan’s anti-foreign propaganda. 

This fear psychology explains the effective use 
by the Klan of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholi¬ 
cism. The Catholic Church has never been a men¬ 
ace to the political, moral, or religious integrity of 
the nation. The members of the Roman Catholic 
communion are to-day more enlightened, wealth¬ 
ier, and more closely identified with the life of 
the nation than ever before. From the Catholic 
Church have always come and are now coming in 
increasing numbers many of the most intelligent 
and patriotic members of our citizenship. The 


CONCERNING KLAN PSYCHOLOGY 125 

Catholic Church, however, thanks to its hierarchi¬ 
cal organization centering in Rome and thanks to 
its super-nationalism with its assumption of a 
spiritual and moral sovereignty that claims to be 
superior to that of American society, lays itself 
open to the charge of being undemocratic, alien, 
un-American. Hence the Roman Catholic Church 
has become the victim of the fear of alien influ¬ 
ence in America. The Jew, who has recently been 
coming to this country mainly from Russia and 
Southeastern Europe by hundreds of thousands 
and who, true to his urban traits, has crowded into 
New York and other large cities where his alien 
characteristics are thrust into the face of the native 
American on the street, in the hotel or department 
store, has also come in for his share of the preva¬ 
lent fear psychology. Henry Ford in the anti- 
Semitic publication he has fathered, The Inter¬ 
national Jeiv, has voiced the fears of the native 
Ajnerican brought into close contact with the un¬ 
assimilated and disagreeably alien Jewish popula¬ 
tion of our large centers. The Klan has simply 
capitalized this situation with tremendous success. 



















CHAPTER V 

THE ELAN AND NATIVISM 

The enumerations of the objectives of the Klan, 
no matter from what section of the country they 
come, usually include the phrase “one hundred 
percent Americanism. ’’ There is, of course, the 
utmost vagueness among Klansmen themselves as 
to the meaning of this term. If, however, there 
is one central idea that serves to unify this vast, 
inchoate Klan movement, sprawling over the land 
like pent-up waters suddenly set free, it must be 
sought in this phrase “one hundred percent 
Americanism.” Americanism as it falls from the 
lips of the Klansman is synonymous with Nativ- 
ism. That is to say, one hundred per cent Ameri¬ 
canism is identified in the mind of the Klansman 
with a body of religious, political, economic, and 
social traditions indigenous to the original Ameri¬ 
can stock and their descendants. The Klan 
thrives best in those communities where this old 
American stock has escaped the influence of the 
immigrant waves on the one hand and of indus- 
127 


128 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

trialism on the other. There is a larger percent¬ 
age of the old undiluted American stock in the 
South and Southwest and in Oregon than in any 
other section of the country. This stock is also 
much in evidence throughout the Middle West. In 
all these regions the Klan has flourished like the 
proverbial green bay tree. On the other hand, 
the Klan has found a cold reception in our large 
cities and in the great manufacturing centers with 
their welter of immigrant groups, their dearth 
of social traditions, and their impersonal pecun¬ 
iary measure of values. The Klan, in its last 
analysis, is a protest on the part of this old Ameri¬ 
can stock against the forces which for good or 
ill are transforming American society. It is es¬ 
sentially conservative and harks back in politics, 
in religion, and in social ethics to the traditions 
of the fathers. It is but the latest phase of what 
for the lack of a better term we shall call Nativ- 
ism. 

i 

Nativism or Native Americanism is a move¬ 
ment which has manifested itself in varying 
forms and with varying intensity for almost one 
hundred years. It originated as a movement 
of self-defence on the part of the older native 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 


129 


stock threatened with submergence by the re¬ 
current waves of immigration. It will be found 
that the outbursts of Nativism are always con¬ 
comitants of an immigrant wave. There have 
been four great waves of immigration into this 
country. The first stretched approximately from 
1831 to 1861, reaching its peak in 1855. During 
these three decades some four millions of foreign¬ 
ers were added to our population. The second 
wave extended from 1862 to 1877, reaching its 
peak in 1873. From 1831 to 1877 the immigrants 
came principally from the British Isles and Ger¬ 
many. The third great immigrant wave extended 
from 1878 to 1897, reaching its peak in 1882. This 
wave added something like nine millions to our 
population, Germans and British subjects still 
predominating though the immigrant tides from 
Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were getting 
under way. 

The fourth and last immigrant wave extended 
from 1898 to the outbreak of the war and was 
marked by two peak years. In 1907 immigration 
reached the astounding figure of 1,285,349, only 
a few thousand more than the 1,218,480 who 
arrived in 1913. During this period Italy took 
the lead, followed closely by Austria-Hungary 
and Russia while Germany and the British Isles 


130 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


trailed far behind. During six of these four¬ 
teen years the immigrant host numbered over one 
million annually, the total being over fourteen 
millions for the period. The total number of im¬ 
migrants to this country since 1820, when reliable 
data began to be kept, is over thirty-three millions. 
These to-day together with their descendants out¬ 
number the descendants of the old Colonial stock. 
According to a conservative estimate some forty 
millions or perhaps forty-two percent of the white 
population of this country are descended through 
both parents from the old Colonial stock. It is 
from this stock that the various forms of the Na- 
tivist movement, including its latest manifesta¬ 
tion, the Ku Klux Klan, have drawn their chief 
support. 

As was to be expected, the Nativist movements 
manifested themselves just after the peak had 
been reached in each of the great immigrant 
waves. Know-Nothingism, for example, which 
was the first pronounced manifestation of Nativ- 
ism, was at its height in 1855, the year after 
the first great immigrant wave reached its 
peak. Sporadic Nativist societies had begun to 
appear prior to Know-Nothingism, such as the 
Patriotic Sons of America, founded in Philadel¬ 
phia in 1847 just when the first immigrant wave 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 


131 


was beginning to mount high and reorganized in 
1866 when the second immigrant wave was com¬ 
ing on. It sought to inculcate pure Americanism 
by opposing all foreign influence, by insisting 
upon the separation of church and state, by keep¬ 
ing public schools free from ecclesiastical influ¬ 
ence and by requiring longer residence of foreign¬ 
ers before admission to citizenship. This has re¬ 
mained the general platform of all subsequent 
Nativist organizations. The peak year of the sec¬ 
ond wave was 1873, the effect of which was seen 
in the planks introduced into Republican and 
Democratic platforms in 1876 in support of Na- 
tivism, the Republican plank going so far as to 
recommend a constitutional amendment prevent¬ 
ing the use of public funds or property in sup¬ 
port of sectarian schools. 

The third peak of immigration was reached in 
1882 with a slightly lesser peak in 1892. During 
this period Nativism asserted itself in the Ameri¬ 
can Protective Association organized in 1887 and 
attaining greatest popularity in 1894 and 1895, 
thus faithfully registering the psychological ef¬ 
fect of the peak year 1892. There were numerous 
other Nativist societies founded about the same 
time, the next in importance to the A. P. A. being 
the National League for the Protection of 


132 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

American Institutions, which numbered among 
its members some of the most prominent men of 
the time. The peak of the fourth and last immi¬ 
grant wave was 1907 with a slightly lesser peak 
in 1914. The Klan was organized in 1915. The 
modern Ku Klux Klan was not strictly speaking 
the immediate product of Nativism, being South¬ 
ern and sectional in origin. But the Klan, thanks 
to the skill of the promoter, E. Y. Clarke, and the 
fear of alien influences aroused by the war, has 
become a national movement mainly because it 
has tapped this old stream of Nativist traditions. 
For this reason the modern Klan, so far as its 
main idea is concerned, is a lineal descendant of 
Know-Nothingism and the American Protective 
Association. This, rather than its connections 
with the old Klan of Reconstruction days, is re¬ 
sponsible for the powerful appeal the Klan has 
made to Americans in every part of the country. 
This is the bond that unites Klansmen from such 
widely divergent sections as Maine and Texas, 
Ohio and Georgia, Oklahoma and New Jersey, 
Oregon and Indiana. 

n 

To understand the Klan, then, we must under¬ 
stand what is meant by Nativism. Perhaps the 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 


133 


earliest formulation of the principles of Nativism 
is to be found in the literature of the Know- 
Nothings, a term supposed to be derived from 
the reply the members of this secret oath-bound 
organization gave to inquiries about the order by 
outsiders. Originating in New York State in 
1852 as a secret society with oath, passwords, 
grip, and ritual, the Know-Nothings spread ra¬ 
pidly and by 1854 began to play a part in politics. 
Under the pressure of political ambitions the se¬ 
cret machinery was later dropped and they ap¬ 
peared as the American Party, though the sou¬ 
briquet Know-Nothings still clung to them. The 
chief reason for the rise of Know-Nothingism was 
the political situation created by the sudden flood 
of immigrants who had easy access to the fran¬ 
chise, for the proper exercise of which, however, 
they were not qualified either mentally or morally. 
Where the old parties were evenly balanced it 
was often possible for this foreign group to wield 
the actual balance of power. Their votes were 
eagerly sought by the politicians, and when these 
votes brought political success the new Ameri¬ 
cans demanded their share of the spoils. As a re¬ 
sult, “The American people, 77 says a Know-Noth¬ 
ing writer, “have found themselves in the power 
of alien-bom men, most of them ignorant, many 


134 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


brutish, a portion of whom can neither read nor 
write, and who have not been in the country long 
enough to learn anything of its institutions or to 
imbibe a genuine American sentiment. They are 
in no sense or degree Americans, except as occu¬ 
pants of American soil. In character, education, 
if they have any, habits, modes of thinking, social 
and religious sentiments, and in every endowment 
of birth and culture, they are foreign and to a 
great extent anti- American .’ 9 Out of this exi¬ 
gency arose the American Party. It was born of 
the instinct of self-preservation. It was felt that 
the old parties were impotent to give relief. The 
fundamental political dogma of the American 
Party and of Nativism is that “Americans shall 
govern America . 

Closely connected with this first thesis of Na¬ 
tivism, namely, America for Americans, we have 
another scarcely less important and that is the 
maintenance of the Protestant faith. “The en¬ 
tire creed [of Know-Nothingism] we think is com¬ 
prised in these two words—Americanism and 
Protestantism,” says a Know-Nothing authority. 
The two are not to be separated. Protestantism 
is but the religious phase of Americanism. Na¬ 
tivism took on this politico-religious form owing 
to the pressure of the Eoman Catholic Church. 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 


135 


The new Americans were predominantly Catholic. 
It was claimed that the Catholic Church gained 
through them a strategic position by which it was 
able to shape public policies. Protestantism was 
thrust into the background because the politician 
could not assert the traditional rights of Prot¬ 
estantism as the original national faith without 
danger of losing Catholic votes. It appeared to 
the Know-Nothings, therefore, that “the two great 
parties and the federal government were bound 
hand and foot to the chair of the Roman Pontiff, 
so far as their Protestantism was concerned.” 
The Know-Nothing party owed its remarkable 
spread, just as does the Klan, to the fact that it 
provided a means of political expression for this 
native Protestantism disgruntled and alarmed by 
the spread of Catholicism. 

The Know-Nothings contended, as does the 
Klan, that this emphasis of Protestantism was 
not a surrender of the American doctrine of the 
separation of church and state. “It is only the 
political element of Protestantism which they 
make use of. The Protestant faith as derived 
from the Bible for the use of the soul is one thing; 
and Protestantism as a political element of the 
state, which ordains that every man shall be per¬ 
mitted to read and interpret the Bible for him- 


136 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


self and not be forced to receive and believe only 
what the priest prescribes and orders, is another. 
This political element of Protestantism is essen¬ 
tial both to civil and religions freedom; and the 
latter can only be secured by the former .’’ That 
is to say, it is the political philosophy of Ameri¬ 
can Protestantism that is at stake. Nativism will 
see that “all the civil rights of Papists will be re¬ 
spected and their religion, as a private right, and 
for all lawful purposes, as of religious societies, 
will be vindicated from insult.” But while “the 
American Party asks no favor of Papists and ex¬ 
pects none, they intend as Protestants to govern 
the country without their aid or hindrance.” 
Here we have, clearly stated three quarters of a 
century ago, the contentions of the Klan with re¬ 
gard to Catholicism and the Protestant faith. 
Protestantism is civilly and politically a constitu¬ 
ent element in Americanism. Catholicism, owing 
to the fact that its genius does not permit the sep¬ 
aration of church and state, is inimical to true 
Americanism—such was and still remains the con¬ 
tention of Nativism. 

The Nativist movement later registered itself 
in the organization of various anti-Catholic so¬ 
cieties, the most numerous and powerful of which 
was the American Protective Association and the 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 


13T 


most respectable the National League for the Pro¬ 
tection of American Institutions. The latter was 
a non-secret patriotic organization whose first 
president was John Jay with William Strong, ex- 
Justice of the Supreme Court, as vice-president. 
Among its membership were such prominent men 
as William Fellowes Morgan, General Francis 
Walker, Judge Peckham, afterwards appointed 
to the Supreme Bench by President Cleveland, 
Henry Hitchcock, ex-president of the American 
Bar, President Andrews of Brown, President 
Jordan of Stanford, President Rogers of North¬ 
western, Levi P. Morton, Cornelius Bliss, Matthew 
Hale, J. Pierpont Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, 
Charles Scribner, Cyrus W. Field, and Rutherford 
B. Hayes. It thus explains the reason for its 
existence. “A movement, with audacious demands 
and specious claims, has been initiated in the state 
of New York for the division of the public school 
funds on sectarian lines and it is announced that 
the same program is proposed for all the states. 
That this has mainly in view selfish and not public 
ends is shown by the fact that the movement is 
being pushed almost exclusively by a single re¬ 
ligious denomination which for many years by its 
chief authorities has been assaulting the public 
school system.’’ The organization sought to safe- 


138 


THE IOJ KLUX KLAN 


guard native Americanism through the adoption 
of an amendment to the Constitution against sec¬ 
tarian interference with the public schools. While 
its immediate object was not attained, the League 
exercised wide influence and aided in the insertion 
into different state constitutions of laws designed 
to preserve the integrity of the public sehool sys¬ 
tem. 

The American Protective Association, which is 
not to he confused with the National League for 
the Protection of American Institutions, was es¬ 
pecially strong in the Middle West, just where 
the Klan numbers its largest membership to-day, 
and at one time claimed a membership of over 
two millions. The A. P. A. was a secret, oath- 
bound organization which was opposed to Cathol¬ 
icism in every shape or form. The A. P. A. is 
the real connecting link between the Klan and 
Know-Nothingism. The accounts of the methods 
of the A. P. A. might easily be mistaken for ac¬ 
counts of the Klan. The A. P. A. made effective 
use of certain campaign documents such as a leaf¬ 
let entitled “Instructions to Catholics ’’ purport¬ 
ing to be a platform for a Papal Party, “decreed 
and ordered by the provincial council at their ses¬ 
sion, August 5, 1890 9 9 and bearing the signatures 
of eight archbishops and the counter-signature of 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 139 

Cardinal Gibbons. In this curious document these 
Catholic authorities are made to “view with 
alarm” the spread of education, the diffusion of 
the English language, and the teaching of the 
young to think; they oppose the public schools as 
godless and seek to control municipal govern¬ 
ments, railroads, manufactories, mines, and espe¬ 
cially the press. To accomplish these ends it may 
prove necessary “to remove or crowd out the 
American heretics who are now employed.” 

A second document used as anti-Catholic propa¬ 
ganda was a pseudo-encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, 
dated December 25th, 1891, in which the Pope is 
made to assert that the American continent be¬ 
longs to him and his church by virtue of its dis¬ 
covery by a Catholic, Columbus, and that the time 
is soon coming when he will take forcible posses¬ 
sion, at which time “it will be the duty of the 
faithful to exterminate all heretics found within 
the jurisdiction of the United States.” There is 
reason to believe that some of the anti-Catholic 
literature used by the A. P. A. has been revived 
and utilized by the Klan. Certainly the Klan has 
made most effective use of the blood-curdling 
oath of the Knights of Columbus long shown to 
be a forgery. Throughout the Middle West Klan 
solicitors are provided with a booklet, “Making 


140 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


America Catholic, ” compiled by A. H. Beach and 
published in 1922. It consists of quotations, ra¬ 
ther cleverly arranged and given without com¬ 
ment, from papal encyclicals, decrees of councils, 
Catholic books and periodicals, the utterances of 
priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, all 
designed to show the fundamental antagonism of 
Catholicism to American institutions and tradi¬ 
tions. 

in 

In any fair estimate of the Nativist movement 
to which the Klan belongs, it must be freely 
granted that the original American stock has a 
very real grievance. The virtues, real or imagined, 
of this old American stock have provided the poet, 
the romancer, and the political spellbinder with 
grateful themes while in actual reality this old 
stock has been sadly discriminated against. It 
has always been a popular belief that every immi¬ 
grant means a pure gain in population. That is to 
say, immigration is popularly supposed to con¬ 
tribute an increase in the population of the coun¬ 
try over and above the normal increase due to 
the natural functioning of the reproductive powers 
of the original American stock. On this assump¬ 
tion the population of the country to-day is sup- 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 141 

posed to consist of that number of the descend¬ 
ants of the original stock of Colonial times who 
would have been born had there been no great im¬ 
migrant waves, plus the immigrants and their 
descendants. This is in all probability an un¬ 
warranted assumption. There are good grounds 
for the contention that the millions who have 
swarmed to our shores do not represent actual 
gains in our population. They have simply taken 
the place of the natural increase of the original 
stock which would have occurred had there been 
no immigration. Every immigrant, therefore, 
merely supplants a possible son or daughter of 
the old American stock. Immigration, in other 
words, has thus acted as a serious check upon the 
perpetuation of the original stock. 

It is argued in support of this thesis that the 
natural increase of the original American stock 
before the coming of the immigrant was very 
great, mounting from four millions in 1790 to thir¬ 
teen millions in 1830, an increase of 227 percent 
in four decades. Had this increase continued, the 
population of this country would have been over 
one hundred millions in 1900 instead of seventy- 
six millions, the actual number, which included 
millions of immigrants. It is interesting to note, 
furthermore, that the decline in the birth-rate of 


142 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


the original stock began just as the pressure of the 
immigrants began to be felt and was most pro¬ 
nounced in those sections of the country, such as 
New England, where the immigrants were most in 
evidence. To these general observations must be 
added the Malthusian principle, which has never 
been invalidated, namely, that increase of popu¬ 
lation always tends to adjust itself to the means 
of subsistence. Given the means of subsistence at 
a certain stage in the history of the American na¬ 
tion and given a certain addition to the popula¬ 
tion through immigration at that stage, it is con¬ 
tended that this increase restricts by so much the 
possible increase of the original American stock. 

A most striking illustration of this Malthusian 
law is found in the disastrous effects upon the 
original American stock of the competition be¬ 
tween its standard of living and that of the immi¬ 
grant. The standard of living, a comprehensive 
term for those necessities, conventions, luxuries, 
or what not, which a given group deems necessary 
for the maintenance of its social status, is much 
higher in the case of the native American than in 
that of the immigrant. The native American, 
forced to compete with the lower wage and lower 
standard of living of the immigrant, is faced with 
the alternatives of limiting the size of his family 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 143 

or of lowering his standard of living. He elects 
invariably the former, thus committing himself 
to a policy of race suicide. Time might equalize 
this competition, since the immigrant tends to 
limit his family also as he approximates the Amer¬ 
ican standard of living, but for the fact that de¬ 
crease in the births of native children creates a 
constant demand for cheap and abundant alien 
labor which the American market cannot supply. 
The net result has been the development of an in¬ 
dustrial order dependent for its profits upon un¬ 
restricted immigration. In his zeal for profits the 
short-sighted native American’s policy meant the 
slow but inevitable elimination of his group. 

IV 

All Nativists, including the Klan, consider 
themselves the sole proprietors of Americanism. 
They tell us it was the forbears of the native 
Americans who acquired at the cost of much 
blood and suffering the freedom and independ¬ 
ence of this country and bequeathed this legacy 
to their sons. “The alien bom has no property 
in them, except by adoption ,’ 9 says a Know- 
Nothing writer. “With him it is not an inherit¬ 
ance but a gift. There is no law of nature or of 


144 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


nations by which the alien born can lay claim to 
such property. If it is of sufficient value to be 
sought by the alien, it is doubtless of sufficient 
value for the owners to prescribe the terms of 
acquisition.’ 9 This amounts to a claim of a 
monopoly of American traditions on the part of 
the Nativists. 

To examine critically the justification for the 
claims of the Nativist raises at once the much de¬ 
bated question, 4 ‘What is Americanism?” Gen¬ 
erally speaking, there are two answers to this 
question. One is what may be called the humani¬ 
tarian and idealistic doctrine that Americanism 
is a body of ideals or, if you please, a mental at¬ 
titude which may be attained independent of race, 
cultural background, or continuity of social heri¬ 
tage. This humanitarian and idealistic position 
has drawn its support from the fact that Ameri¬ 
can political ideals have always had a detached 
existence more or less remote from political reali¬ 
ties, from the struggle to free the slave and en¬ 
dow him with complete American citizenship, 
from the economic need for cheap labor, and 
finally from the traditional belief that America 
was intended by God to be the asylum of the op¬ 
pressed of all nations. The other conception of 
Americanism is that of the Nativist who con- 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 145 

tends that national ideals cannot be divorced from 
ethnic stock, language, laws, religion, and con¬ 
tinuity of social traditions. Nativism contains, 
implicitly at least, the assumption that a nation, 
like an individual, is a psycho-physical organism. 
Ideas, sentiments, loyalties, do not thrive as sub¬ 
limated spiritual abstractions. They are the cor¬ 
relatives in the realm of thought and feeling of 
prevailing ways of life in business, politics, and so¬ 
cial relations. Destroy or seriously disrupt this 
material basis of these ideas through revolution, 
through war, or through vast and sudden shifts in 
the ethnic composition of society, and you en¬ 
danger these ideals. The contention of Nativism 
and the Klan is that the group it represents, by 
virtue of its ethnic homogeneity, its close and con¬ 
stant identification with the evolution of American 
society, is best equipped to be the guardian of 
American traditions. The claim is one that can 
not be lightly dismissed or ignored. 

v 

There are at least three arguments Nativists 
may advance in support of their contention that 
the old stock must control and direct national life. 
Nativists may base their claim upon the alleged 


146 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


inherent superiority of the original racial stock 
that established American institutions, upon the 
possession of superior education and intelligence 
so necessary for the solution of present-day 
problems, or upon the fact that the scions of the 
old stock occupy among the classes and groups in 
society a mediating position which entitles them 
to play the leading part in the formation of public 
opinion, the final arbiter of issues in a democracy. 

Since the great war our book stalls have been 
flooded with hectic works that have come to the 
support of Native Americanism from the stand¬ 
point of race. They are for the most part glorifi¬ 
cations of the Nordic race. One of the more re¬ 
cent of these writers thus states the conclusion 
of his argument: 66 Would it not be wise for us to 
consider carefully our country’s present situa¬ 
tion? Events have occurred which would have 
seemed to our forefathers impossible. Doctrines 
have been widely preached subversive of their in¬ 
stitutions, and this has been accomplished by 
methods too contemptible and too base to be 
cited here. Americans of the old stock have still 
left some rights, are still entitled to some consid¬ 
eration, and, failing to receive it, still hold in their 
hands the power to enforce respect and obedience 
to the institutions they love. Never yet have they 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 


147 


failed to carry any great cause which they have es¬ 
poused. The old American blood once roused can 
still be counted upon absolutely. ... It was not 
the Russian, nor the Pole, nor any other foreign 
element who, roused by infamous cruelties, swept 
the country into the Spanish War. It was not the 
Russian, nor the Pole, nor any other foreign strain 
who swept the country into this last war,—it was 
the old American stock which has ever stood for 
right and justice.” (Charles W. Gould, America 
a Family Matter, p. 159f. Similar ideas are ad¬ 
vanced by William McDougall, Is America Safe 
for Democracy? Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising 
Tide of Color; Madison Grant, The Passing of a 
Great Race.) This is the familiar language of 
Nativism, and the large reading public these books 
have found should throw some light for us upon 
the spread of the Klan. 

There is much that seems to support the Nativ- 
ist claim to supremacy based upon racial stock. 
There is first the indisputable fact of the relative 
ethnic homogeneity of the American stock at the 
time of the Revolution when this old stock shaped 
our national institutions. Old New England with 
a pure English stock left a deep impress upon the 
nation while modern New England with a diverse 
ethnic stock is now playing a lame and impo- 


148 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


tent role in the life of the nation. Granting the 
contention of the Nativist as to the superiority of 
this original stock, who is responsible for the pres¬ 
ent situation ? This same splendid original Amer¬ 
ican stock has encouraged an immigration policy 
by which of its own free will it has doomed itself to 
the position of a racial minority. For good or for 
ill the days of the racial predominance of the 
Colonial stock are gone, and apparently forever. 
The racial unity of the American nation now be¬ 
longs to the past. What the outcome of our ra¬ 
cial “melting pot” will be rests upon the knees of 
the gods. It may very well be, as is asserted of 
the racial potpourri in Brazil and other lands to 
the south of us, that some racial type, perhaps 
that of the original American stock, will prevail, 
impressing itself upon all the other racial variants. 
It may be as Zangwill makes his hero, the 
Russian Jew, say in the Melting Pot, “America is 
God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all 
the races of Europe are melting and re-forming. 
... The real American has not yet arrived. He 
is only in the Crucible. I tell you—he will be the 
fusion of all races, perhaps the coming Super¬ 
man. 9 9 

At the present stage of national development 
the pressing problem is, what shall be the rela- 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 


149 


tions of these various ethnic groups to each other ? 
Shall we encourage, in the interest of effective 
social control, the dominance of one group, such as 
the descendants of the old stock, shall we seek a 
federation of racial groups, or shall we with the 
sentimental idealists ignore race as a negligible 
factor in the problem? Without in the least mini¬ 
mizing race as a factor in the situation it is safe 
to say that race alone can never he made the basis 
for a valid claim to leadership in a democracy. 
The possession of a white skin does not predestine 
a man to mastery any more than the possession of 
a black skin predestines him to slavery. The 
Klan contention of “white supremacy,” in so far 
as it is based upon the mere accident of skin- 
color, is the sheerest democratic heresy. Mean¬ 
while, it is worthy of note that, while the champion 
of the old Ajnerican stock is uncritically assuming 
the correctness of his theory of Americanism and 
is seeking to convince recalcitrants by Lusk laws 
or tar and feather parties, some of the most 
scholarly contributions to the problem are being 
made by Americans of alien stock whose conclu¬ 
sions are uniformly opposed to the orthodox one 
hundred percent Americanism of the Nativists. 
(See, for example, I. B. Berkson: Theories of 
Americanization , 1920.) 


150 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


Recently an interesting plea has been made for 
the leadership of the descendants of the old Amer¬ 
ican stock on the ground that they furnish the 
brain power of the nation. (John Corbin, The Be- 
turn of the Middle Class , 1923.) American society, 
it is contended, is divided into three major classes, 
those who work with their hands, those who work 
with their brains, and the capitalists. The ener¬ 
gies of the hand-worker are absorbed by the strug¬ 
gle for bread, those of the capitalist by the strug¬ 
gle for profits, while the brain workers alone, who 
include the intellectual and professional classes, 
are in the position to play a role of real leader¬ 
ship. These brain-workers are “very largely” 
the descendants of the original American stock. 
They, together with the kindred immigrants of 
Nordic stock coming from northern Europe, com¬ 
pose three-fourths of our population and are 
best equipped, we are told, by virtue of their na¬ 
tive ability to provide national leadership. Upon 
closer scrutiny it would appear that this argu¬ 
ment resolves itself into a variant of the racialists’ 
theory that the original American stock and its 
descendants owe their brains and hence their right 
to leadership not to the social or cultural ad¬ 
vantages which they enjoy but to the inherent 
superiority of their racial stock. Incidentally, it 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 


151 


may be remarked that this threefold classification 
of society is so vague as to be of little practical 
value. The term “brain-workers” cuts across 
more than it follows actual social stratifications 
and groupings. 

It is possible for the Nativists to build up a 
much stronger argument in support of their bid 
for supremacy by claiming that their group fur¬ 
nishes the best basis for a saving middle class 
in American society. In every society there must 
be a ruling class or at least a class that forms the 
basis for social control. The free citizens of an¬ 
cient Athens, the patricians of Eome, the clergy of 
the Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie of early nine¬ 
teenth-century France and England, the Junkers 
of pre-war Germany, the slavocracy of the ante¬ 
bellum South, the Captains of Industry two or 
three decades ago—all these served in more or 
less pronounced fashion as agents of social con¬ 
trol in the societies of which they were members. 
This is more or less inevitable, for every social 
order must have direction and purpose. There 
must be individuals and groups through whom 
social unity is secured. Government is and al¬ 
ways will be more or less the expression of the 
will of a class. The problem is not so much one of 
getting rid of a ruling class as of making sure 


152 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


that the class which dominates furthers the good 
of the whole. Democracies are no exception to 
this general rule. They, too, must have their 
ruling class. In theory, if not in actual practice, 
the ruling class in modern democracies has been 
the so-called middle or mediating class. The idea 
seems to have been suggested by the role played 
by the bourgeoisie in the formation of nineteenth- 
century democracy in France, England, and Amer¬ 
ica. 

The chief justification of the rule of the middle 
class in a democracy lies in the important role this 
class is supposed to play in the formation of pub¬ 
lic opinion. In a democracy sovereignty is vested 
in no one individual or group. The real sover¬ 
eign is reason or public opinion. But public opin¬ 
ion is not an individual affair; it is a social prod¬ 
uct. The reasoned common sense of the commu¬ 
nity is theoretically the real ruler in a democracy. 
"While this reasoned common sense is the sole pos¬ 
session of no individual or class, any class which 
by training or social position is best equipped to 
express this reasoned common sense and put it 
into execution must necessarily take precedence 
over other classes. The middle class, at least from 
the point of view of traditional nineteenth-century 
democracy, is entitled to precedence because it, 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 153 

more than any other class, gives shape to public 
opinion. 

In order adequately to perform its task of mold¬ 
ing opinion the middle class must have certain 
qualities. It must be composed mainly of those 
who are neither very poor nor very rich. The 
middle class must be free from poverty because 
poverty is a form of slavery and prevents the 
individual or the group from entering whole¬ 
heartedly and sympathetically into the life of 
the community. A measure of economic goods 
also permits leisure for reflection and the effective 
discharge of social and political duties. On the 
other hand, the middle class must know the disci¬ 
pline of work to understand the life of the work¬ 
ers and to escape the social isolation and artificial 
conceptions of life too often the bane of the very 
rich. The middle class must be informed. That 
is to say, it must have a keen intellectual appre¬ 
ciation of the drift of things in society and be en¬ 
dowed with a measure of critical independence of 
mind if it is to perform properly its exceedingly 
important task of giving shape to public opinion. 
The formation of effective public opinion involves 
the reduction to intelligible terms of that vast 
mass of class passions and prejudices, local loves 
and hates, the crude unreasoned loyalties that jos- 


154 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

tie each other in the welter of immediate social 
experience. This is no easy task but it is the con¬ 
dition prerequisite to effective leadership in a 
democracy. Finally the middle class must be class- 
conscious in the sense that it must be aware of its 
own existence and of its peculiar tasks. It goes 
without saying that effective class-consciousness 
is never gained except through the spur and dis¬ 
cipline of action. It is only while performing some 
common social task and thereby experiencing the 
psychological effects of group action that any 
class becomes aware of its own existence and for¬ 
mulates its ends. 

To what extent does the Klan measure up to 
those things required of the class that aspires to 
leadership in American democracy? Does it rep¬ 
resent an intelligent, class-conscious, sanely bal¬ 
anced middle class to which may be entrusted the 
most important task of molding public sentiment? 
In the first place, it must be acknowledged that the 
Klan draws its support mainly from the old Amer¬ 
ican stock which by tradition and training occu¬ 
pies a strategic position in American society. This 
old stock may well claim that it can furnish us with 
the best basis for a democratic ruling middle class. 
Assuming, however, that such a middle class is 
possible to-day in American society, an assump- 


THE KLAN AND NATIVISM 155 

tion which, to say the least, is debatable, the Klan 
includes only a minority of those who are sup¬ 
posed to make up this middle class. As we have 
seen, there are large segments of American so¬ 
ciety, composed of descendants of native Ameri¬ 
can stock, who do not sympathize with the Klan. 
The Klan does not speak for this group as a 
whole. The Klan speaks mainly for that provin¬ 
cial, small-town, native Americanism which is in¬ 
tensely suspicious of all things foreign. The Klan, 
furthermore, does not strive to mediate between 
conflicting groups and classes. It is intensely and 
bitterly partisan. It does not seek to cultivate the 
whole or social point of view. The Klan’s intoler¬ 
ance incapacitates it for the task of molding public, 
opinion. 

Finally, does the Klan measure up to the intel¬ 
lectual requirements of the dominant middle 
class? If there is one outstanding fact to be noted 
of the majority of the Klan members it is their 
intellectual mediocrity. Neither the intellectual 
leaders of the community nor the men of ability 
in the professions or business tend to identify 
themselves with the Klan. A long-time resident 
of Atlanta who has observed the Klan at close 
range makes this observation, “The Ku Klux 
Klan, so far as my observation goes, is composed 


156 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


principally of politicians and that class of men 
who earn twenty, twenty-five, or thirty dollars per 
week. In other words, the average intelligence of 
the membership would be low. Where an intelli¬ 
gent man has become a member of the order it is 
because that man is unscrupulous and is using the 
order to enhance his own interests politically or 
otherwise. . . . They do a lot of talking about 
their ideals but they do nothing so far as I can 
see except talk. That, I believe, is because they 
do not have members of sufficient brains or vision 
to really do anything along these lines.” This 
statement is somewhat extreme but it has back of 
it a substantial basis of truth. The Klan is con¬ 
spicuously lacking in that refinement of sentiment 
and critical independence of thought which must 
be possessed by any individual or class that under¬ 
takes to shape public opinion in a democracy. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 

I 

Through a questionnaire, by personal interviews 
and otherwise, the writer has attempted to dis¬ 
cover the reasons for joining the Klan. Natu¬ 
rally one finds the greatest variety of motives, re¬ 
ligious, racial, social, political, commercial, but 
the motive which has gained most members for 
the Klan, taking precedence over all others in the 
strength and universality of its appeal, is un¬ 
doubtedly anti-Catholicism. £Out of several hun¬ 
dred representative citizens from various parts of 
the country who were asked to mention, in the 
order of the effectiveness of their appeal, the in¬ 
centives to join the Klan, all mentioned anti- 
Catholicism and a large percentage placed it first. 
This anti-Catholicism is not localized, being strong 
in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kansas, Oregon, as well 
as in Georgia and Louisiana/} Furthermore, it is 
insisted that this anti-Catholicism is not to be 

157 


158 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


identified with mere religious prejudice. Klans- 
men reiterate that they are not opposed to Ca¬ 
tholicism as a religion. They acknowledge freely 
the right of the Catholic to worship Cod according 
to the dictates of his own conscience. There are 
of course surface irritants such as the petty jeal¬ 
ousy and fear the Protestant clergy and laity often 
show for the power and prestige of the Church of 
Eome, the reputed clannishness of the Catholics, 
the charges of collusion between priest and poli¬ 
tician to get social control, and the alleged hos¬ 
tility of Catholics to the public school. But deeper 
than all this lies the vague feeling that the center 
of authority of the Eoman Catholic Church, as 
opposed to Protestantism, lies outside of and su¬ 
perior to the American society in which Catholic 
and Protestant live. The Klan interprets this as 
a menace to the spiritual and moral integrity of 
America. It is asserted that for one very large 
group, namely, the Catholics, the enlightened 
moral and religious sensibilities of the American 
people cannot speak the last word. That last 
word is spoken by the infallible head of a vast the¬ 
ocratic autocracy, namely, the Pope. There is not 
the slightest doubt that this has gained for the 
Klan more serious-minded supporters, North, 
South, East, and West, than anything else. As a 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 159 

prominent Texan, not a Klansman, puts it, “The 
popular idea is that the Klan is loyal to our gov¬ 
ernment and many organizations are not. It is 
not religion in the Romanist to which the Klan ob¬ 
jects, but treason.” Such an accusation sounds 
harsh and unjust. We are not concerned now to 
discuss its justification. The significant thing to 
remember here is that this attitude is taken 
towards the Roman Catholic Church by millions 
of Americans, many of whom have no connection 
with the Klan. 

What is the attitude of the twenty millions of 
Catholic Americans towards the Klan? There 
exists for the Catholic of course the very evident 
temptation of being drawn into a fruitless and un¬ 
dignified squabble with the Klan. It is possible 
that Catholic support, financial and moral, is be¬ 
hind the American Unity League of Chicago or¬ 
ganized to fight the Klan. The League’s official 
organ, Tolerance , may be said to rival the most 
rabid Klan publications in its shrieking and hys¬ 
terical condemnations of all things pertaining to 
the Klan. At the meetings of the League, speak¬ 
ers indulge in passionate oratory, consisting for 
the most part of denunciations of the Klan min¬ 
gled with the insistence upon “rights” of Irish- 
Catholic, Jew, or Negro, while, as a Chicago paper 


160 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

remarked, “No one seems to be interested in pro¬ 
tecting the rights of those who call themselves 
plain, ordinary American citizens . 9 9 On the whole, 
however, it must be said that the Catholic group, 
especially the official representatives of the 
Catholic Church, have conducted themselves with 
a dignity and reserve that stand in pleasing con¬ 
trast to the hectic abandon of the leaders of the 
Klan. 

no state of the union perhaps has the an¬ 
tagonism between Protestant and Catholic been 
fanned by the Klan to such a dangerous pitch as 
in Louisiana during the Mer Rouge trials and 
the subsequent political campaigns. In the town 
of Lafayette, in southern Louisiana, largely Cath¬ 
olic, feeling ran so strong in March, 1923, due to 
the publication of the list of charter members of 
the Klan, that there was great danger of blood¬ 
shed. The Catholic bishop, Rev. Jules B. Jean- 
mard, issued a proclamation deploring a situation 
that threatened the ‘ ‘ total disruption of that spirit 
of harmony, tolerance and brotherly love that has 
characterized our community heretofore ’ 9 and re¬ 
minding his people that they were “too big, too 
generous and brave” to take advantage of their 
numerical superiority to wreak a cheap revenge 
upon the Klan. Bishop Jeanmard undoubtedly 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 161 


voices the feeling of all enlightened Catholics 
when he asserts that the Klan “uses the language 
of the Ghetto in speaking of persons and things 
Catholics hold sacred and impugns our loyalty and 
devotion to the country and its institutions. A 
prominent Catholic of Evansville, Indiana, writes, 
“Catholics without exception condemn the Klan 
as un-American and un-Christian, violating in 
particular the laws of charity and dangerous to 
democratic government.’O 

n 

An historian of the Know-Nothing Party as¬ 
serted that this party owed its vitality to ‘ ‘ the time- 
honored Anglo-Saxon and Evangelical aspersion 
of the integrity of Catholic citizenship, an asper¬ 
sion as old as the age of Queen Elizabeth and 
responsible for the persecuting statutes of her 
time; an aspersion too, which though diminishing 
in force from generation to generation is, never¬ 
theless, liable to recur in years to come and dur¬ 
ing future flurries of intolerance’’ (Humphrey J. 
Desmond, The Know-Nothing Party , p. 109). If 
the historian had written with prophetic knowl¬ 
edge of the rise of the modern Ku Klux Klan he 
could not have forecast the future more ac- 


162 


THE IOJ KLUX KLAN 


curately. The antipathy of the Klansman to the 
Catholic is therefore nothing new. It is hut the 
latest phase of a mental attitude that has char¬ 
acterized native Americanism from the very be¬ 
ginning. Obviously, then, we can best grasp the 
meaning of the present anti-Catholic outburst in 
the light of the historical perspective. 

We have seen that the Nativist movement stimu¬ 
lated by the first two great immigrant tides whose 
peak years were 1854 and 1872 was primarily 
political and only secondarily religious. The re¬ 
ligious phase was present in the case of Know- 
Nothingism but grew out of the political. The 
Nativist opposition aroused by the third immi¬ 
grant wave of 1894, however, and represented by 
the American Protective Association (A. P. A.) 
was mainly religious. The emphasis of the re¬ 
ligious phase of Nativism in the early nineties 
was due to the sudden rise to a position of com¬ 
manding influence in almost every phase of Ameri¬ 
can life of the Roman Catholic Church. From 1880 
to 1894 over eight millions of immigrants arrived, 
the majority of whom were Catholics. These, to¬ 
gether with the large Catholic additions of the 
first two waves of immigration, increased the 
Catholic element so rapidly as to cause great un¬ 
easiness among the Nativists. The Catholics in 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 163 

1840 numbered little more than a million. In 1895 
Catholic authorities claimed 12,500,000 followers 
of the Catholic faith. The yearly increase of the 
Catholic population, which in 1850 was some¬ 
thing over 72,000, had jumped to over 350,000 in 
1890. 

The Catholicism of the immigrant waves as op¬ 
posed to the older native Catholicism of Maryland 
or Louisiana, where a sort of modus vivendi had 
been established between Protestants and Catho¬ 
lics, took on something of the character of an alien 
religious colonization. It found its chief support 
in the foreign population herded in the great cities 
or the manufacturing centers. The immigrant 
who had lost touch with the traditions of the 
mother country still clung to his religion and 
brought with him his priest and a cultus which 
in form and spirit was essentially un-American. 
The situation was not helped by the fact that the 
Catholic Church is oriented in all matters of 
policy, whether religious, political, educational, or 
social, from a center outside the bounds of Ameri¬ 
can society, namely, the Pope and his entourage 
at Rome. It was natural, furthermore, for Catho¬ 
lic leaders to make the unprecedented expansion 
of their church in America the basis for expres¬ 
sions of religious ambitions, not to say downright 


164 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


boastings, which contemplated nothing short of a 
Catholic America. Even as tactful a prelate as 
Cardinal Gibbons seems to have been tinged with 
this Catholic imperialism when in an enumeration 
of the contributions of his church to national life 
he said: “The birth rate in the United States is 
all in favor of the Church. The Irish, the Catho¬ 
lic Germans anH Canadians are proverbially pro¬ 
lific; and there are other reasons which we may 
not enter upon here, and which point to an entirely 
disproportionate increase of Catholics in the near 
future. ” (A Retrospect of Fifty Years, Vol. I, 
p. 250.) 

The high tide of Catholic imperialism in this 
country seems to have been reached in 1892 when 
Monsignor Satolli was sent as the Apostolic Dele¬ 
gate of the Vatican to the United States. Im¬ 
perialistic ambitions cropped out in his address 
to the students of Gonzaga College in 1893 when 
he said, “The action of the Catholic faith and 
morality is favorable in every way to the direc¬ 
tion in which the Constitution turns. The more 
public opinion and the government favor the Cath¬ 
olic schools the more will the welfare of the com¬ 
monwealth be advanced. The Catholic educa¬ 
tion is the surest safeguard of the permanence 
throughout the centuries of the Constitution and 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 165 


the best guide of the Republic in civic progress. 
From this source the Constitution will gather that 
assimilation so necessary for the perfect organi¬ 
zation of the great progressive body which is the 
American Republic.” Here in vague and guarded 
language we have applied to the future of Amer¬ 
ica the central idea of Catholicism, namely, the as¬ 
sumption of a politico-religious unity in which the 
central and commanding place is held by the 
ecclesiastical super-nationalism of the Roman 
Catholic Church. 

These veiled indications of Catholic hopes of 
transforming America into a Catholic nation 
aroused wide-spread opposition, not only among 
Protestants but even among patriotic Catholics. 
The situation did not meet with the approval of 
the majority of the American Catholic bishops. 
Bishop Spalding, one of the most intelligent and 
able of them, asserted, “That the Delegate Satolli 
has been and is a source of strength to the Apaists 
(American Protective Association) there can be 
no doubt. With us as in the Protestant world 
generally, anti-Catholic prejudice is largely anti- 
papal prejudice; and when the organs of public 
opinion were filled with the sayings and doings of 
‘the American Pope’ who though a foreigner, with 
no intentions of becoming a citizen, ignorant alike 


166 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


of our language and traditions, was supposed to 
have supreme authority in the Church in America, 
fresh fuel was thrown upon the fire of bigotry. 
The fact that his authority is ecclesiastical merely 
and concerns Catholics not as citizens but as 
members of the Church is lost sight of by the 
multitudes who are persuaded that the papacy 
is a political power eager to extend its control 
wherever opportunity may offer.” 

The rapid growth of the Catholic Church called 
out the most rabid anti-Catholic movement in 
American history, namely, the American Protec¬ 
tive Association. This A. P. A. Movement revived 
and strengthened the old traditional Protestant 
antipathy to Catholicism by identifying the Cath¬ 
olic Church with the alien and un-American ele¬ 
ments introduced by immigration. These tradi¬ 
tions of anti-Catholicism persisted after Apaism 
had died down as a political movement; they only 
needed some social strain or profound upheaval 
to bring them to the surface again. The war and 
the fears it kindled, especially the wide-spread 
distrust of all things foreign, naturally crystal¬ 
lized around this old traditional fear of the Catho¬ 
lic Church. In parts of the Middle West, where 
the American Protective Association found its 
main support, the Klan organizers have been en- 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 167 

dorsed by former members of the A. P. A., thus 
indicating the kinship of the two movements. One 
who takes the trouble to plot the area of the coun¬ 
try, especially in the Middle West where the 
A. P. A. was strongest, will find that these sections 
have provided the Klan with its largest following. 

The mantle of the American Protective Asso¬ 
ciation, therefore, has fallen upon the shoulders 
of the Klan so far as anti-Catholicism is con¬ 
cerned. To-day, in communities where the Klan 
is rife, we meet with the same sensational stories 
circulated in the nineties, for example that the 
Catholics are storing arms in the basements of 
their churches and drilling at night. In Klan- 
ridden communities, as in Oregon, we find the 
familiar figure of the apostate monk or nun, more 
recent reproductions of the famous Maria Monk of 
A. P. A. days, touring the country at the instance 
of the Klan and revealing the secret machinations 
of the Catholic Church. And to-day, just as a 
generation ago, we find thousands of educated 
Americans lending an ear to these preposterous 
tales. To-day, just as in the early nineties, we 
find the Klan making use of anti-Catholic litera¬ 
ture which, as in the case of the famous oath of 
the Knights of Columbus, has been proven to con¬ 
tain malicious and incredible slanders of fellow 


168 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

Americans of the Catholic faith. In some sections 
of the country the Klan promoters have ap¬ 
parently resurrected old A. P. A. anti-Catholic lit¬ 
erature. 

In the case of the A. P. A. as of the Klan we meet 
with the same fundamental inconsistency between 
its platform of alleged principles and its actual 
conduct. The A. P. A. asserted, “We attack no 
man’s religion so long as he does not attempt to 
make his religion an element of political power.’’ 
Yet a member of the A. P. A. was bound by his 
oath never to favor the nomination x>f a Catholic 
for public office nor to employ a Catholic in any 
services where a Protestant could be obtained. 
Similarly the Klan, as we have seen, insists, in the 
published statements of its ideals, upon complete 
religious toleration while in actual practice it en¬ 
courages boycotts of Catholic and Jew in busi¬ 
ness and social relations. The A. P. A. movement 
boasted a system of espionage by which spies were 
detailed to report the doings of prominent Catho¬ 
lics and to make public the secret plottings of 
these enemies of the republic. Similarly the Klan 
boasts of a secret system of obtaining knowledge 
by which the Invisible Empire is able to “see 
all and hear all.” The member of the A. P. A., 
just as the modern Klansman, justified his secret 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 169 


methods on the ground that in fighting the devil 
you must make use of the devil’s methods. 

Three factors have combined to create in the 
mind of the Klansman the feeling of a fundamental 
incompatibility between the Catholic Church and 
one hundred percent Americanism. The first of 
these is the historic antagonism of Protestantism 
to Catholicism. Where rock-ribbed evangelical 
orthodoxy has persisted in most undiluted form, 
as in the South, this antagonism has likewise per¬ 
sisted in the most pronounced fashion because sin¬ 
cere but unenlightened religious loyalties have 
acted as a preservative to perpetuate it. Powerful 
sentiments, such as those aroused by religion, act 
like a preserving medium upon ideas which they 
happen to contain. These ideas, though often 
false, persist because they are not subjected to 
intelligent and effective criticism. They enjoy a 
protected and hence artificial life, like that of 
hot-house plants, which gives them the appearance 
of being sacred and eternal verities. Eterna non 
caduca is the favorite claim of the orthodox theolo¬ 
gian for his creed, as opposed to the shifting 
beliefs of the heretic. Thus do obsolete ideas, 
especially in religion, maintain their form just 
as the mummy of a Rameses, thanks to the skill 
of the Egyptian embalmer, retains the actual fea- 


170 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

tures of the ruler who has been dead some thirty- 
two hundred years. 

This explains, in part at least, the paradoxical 
fact that anti-Catholicism is strongest in sections 
of the country such as Georgia, Texas or Oregon 
where the Catholics compose only a small fraction 
of the total population but where orthodox Prot¬ 
estantism reigns supreme. It is no accident that 
in those sections where the rigid frame-work of 
traditional orthodox Protestantism has been bro¬ 
ken down, as in the larger centers of popula¬ 
tion, we find the most tolerant attitude among 
Protestants towards the members of the Catholic 
communion. This original antipathy of Protes¬ 
tantism to Catholicism was strengthened by a sec¬ 
ond factor, namely, that for the best part of a 
century a stream of aliens has flooded our shores, 
in the main members of the Catholic Church, thus 
serving to identify the Catholic Church in the 
mind of the native American with the alien and 
un-American forces in this country. Finally the 
political philosophy implicit in the super-nation¬ 
alism of the Roman Catholic Church, like a 
Banquo’s ghost that will not down, is ever aris¬ 
ing to trouble the fancy of one hundred percent 
Americans made uneasy by situations involving 
the integrity of the nation’s life. 



THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 171 


m 


There can be no intelligent criticism of the 
Klansman’s condemnation of the Catholic Church 
as un-American without some knowledge of the 
development of the Catholic Church in America 
and the way in which American Catholics have 
reconciled loyalty to their country with loyalty to 
their church. At the beginning of our national life 
the Catholics were a negligible element. At the 
outbreak of the War of Independence they num¬ 
bered hardly more than thirty thousand among a 
total population of three or four millions. This 
weak and despised minority stood up strongly for 
independence and religious toleration and fur¬ 
nished four signers of the Declaration of Inde¬ 
pendence, namely, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Thomas 
Sims Lee, and David and Charles Carroll. 1 

Though nominally enjoying the benefits of re¬ 
ligious liberty, the Catholics for a generation or 

i Under the leadership of John Carroll, made Bishop of Balti¬ 
more in 1790, the Catholics played such a noteworthy role in 
the struggle for freedom as to win the commendation of Wash¬ 
ington. Washington’s friendly and tolerant attitude may have 
given rise to the belief that he was a Catholic. The Catholic 
historian, Thomas O’Gorman, in his History of the Roman Cath¬ 
olic Church in America, p. 289, makes this curious statement, “Of 
late years some Catholic writers have claimed that Washing¬ 
ton died a Catholic. At most we may perhaps say that he was 
thinking of such a step.” 


172 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


more after the revolution were ostracized by a 
people who with their ministry held all Catholics 
under suspicion. Two events did much, later on, 
to break down this social isolation of the Catholics, 
the onset of the Irish-Catholic immigration in the 
thirties and the decay of Protestant orthodoxy 
about the middle of the century. Describing the 
status of the Catholics during the early decades 
of the last century, DeTocqueville remarks: “If, 
then, the Catholic citizens of the United States 
are not forcibly led by the nature of their tenets 
to adopt democratic and republican principles, at 
least they are not necessarily opposed to them; 
and their social position, as well as their limited 
number, obliges them to adopt these opinions. 
Most of the Catholics are poor, and they have no 
chance of taking a part in the government unless 
it be open to all the citizens. They constitute a 
minority and all rights must be respected in order 
to assure to them the free exercise of their own 
privileges. These two causes induce them uncon¬ 
sciously to adopt political principles which they 
would perhaps support, with less zeal if they were 
rich and preponderant. The Catholic clergy of 
the United States has never attempted to oppose 
this political tendency but seeks rather to justify 
its results. The priests of America have divided 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 173 

the intellectual world into two parts; in the one 
they place the doctrines of revealed religion, which 
command their assent; in the other they leave 
those truths which they believe to have been freely 
left open to the researches of political inquiry. 
Thus the Catholics of the United States are at 
the same time the most faithful believers and the 
most zealous citizens’’ (Democracy in America, 
Colonial Press, ed. I, p. 306). 

It will be seen at once that the situation of the 
Catholic Church in America, characterized with 
keen insight by DeTocqueville, is full of interest¬ 
ing possibilities. In the first place, here is a great 
historic faith which has always insisted upon the 
union of church and state, forced to develop under 
political institutions requiring the separation of 
church and state. Moreover, the exigencies of the 
situation, namely, the poverty and numerical 
weakness of the Catholics, made it to their advan¬ 
tage to insist upon this very separation of church 
and state in spite of the fact that it is antago¬ 
nistic to the traditional Catholic point of view. 
For, obviously, any intervention by a state, pre¬ 
dominantly Protestant in its sympathies, in the 
affairs of Catholics would be unwelcome. To exist 
at all, the Catholic Church was forced at the out¬ 
set to take a position hardly in harmony with its 


174 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

traditions. Under the Constitution it must be 
content to be merely one of many rival religious 
faiths, all tolerated alike, all enjoying equal rights 
before the law. The Catholic Church, through the 
sheer force of circumstances, its own traditional 
dogmas to the contrary notwithstanding, was 
thus compelled to acknowledge in actual practice, 
if not in theory, that its claim to be the only 
true and authoritative religion had no greater 
validity in the eyes of the state than other simi¬ 
lar claims by rival faiths. Such a situation tended 
to create in the thought and life of American 
Catholics a curious dualism which historic Ca¬ 
tholicism has never tolerated. It is the dualism 
created by the enforced separation of secular and 
religious matters. This gives rise to two sets of 
loyalties constantly bidding for the control of 
American Catholics. On the one hand, we have 
the intimate spiritual and institutional life of the 
Church with its international ramifications; on the 
other, the practical civic and social life of Ameri¬ 
can Catholics as members of American society. 
Which is to take precedence? 

It is interesting to surmise what would have 
been the future of American Catholicism had it 
been free to develop, as did the other religious 
faiths of America, through the normal increase of 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 175 

the Catholic population. It is quite possible that 
we should have seen in time the emergence in this 
country of a phase of Catholicism that would have 
modified profoundly the Catholic Church as a 
whole. But the forces at work, which if left free 
might have given us a thoroughly Ajnericanized 
Catholicism, were constantly being offset by the 
immigrant tide from Europe. This vast stream 
of European Catholicism made difficult the devel¬ 
opment of a purely American type of Catholicism 
and assured in the end the preservation of the 
identity of European and American Catholicism. 
The leaders of American Catholicism, especially 
at first, were recruited from Europe, being 
French, German, or Irish by birth. Even in the 
case of native-born Americans, their training was 
gotten in the Catholic institutions of Europe and 
not in America. The early immigrants, especially 
the Irish, were soldiers of fortune, and exhausted 
their resources in reaching this country. Hence 
they settled as laborers in the large cities of the 
East. American Catholicism has always been 
mainly urban. This made it an easy matter to 
organize parishes and place over them priests 
trained in Europe. The priests of later Catholic 
immigrants often spoke only the language of their 
people. To these factors tending to preserve the 


176 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


traditions of European Catholicism must be added 
the ever-watchful eye of Rome, jealous for the 
purity of the Catholic faith and the supremacy 
of the Apostolic See. 

Catholicism, therefore, remained until well 
towards the middle of the century more or less 
an alien and exotic growth in American life. The 
flood of immigrants of the Catholic faith was 
mainly responsible for this. They kept the ma¬ 
jority of the membership of the church alien in 
complexion. They effectually prevented the de¬ 
velopment of a type of Catholicism that could be 
called American. They gave to the Know-Noth¬ 
ings and even to the Apaists an excuse for charg¬ 
ing the Catholic Church with being alien and un- 
American. It was not until the third quarter of 
the century that a movement began to take shape 
within the Catholic Church giving some idea of 
what a purely American type of Catholicism might 
be. 16 Americanism ’ 9 is the general name for this 
movement, though the term seems to have been 
used for the first time in 1884 in connection with 
the language controversy in the Catholic schools. 
It has now come to be synonymous with the nation¬ 
alist and liberal movement within American Ca¬ 
tholicism. (See Albert Houtin, L’Americanisme, 
Paris, 1904.) 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 177 

In 1893 Archbishop Ireland of St. Paul wrote, 
4 4 The American current which for a quarter of 
a century runs so plainly in the ocean of Catholi¬ 
cism, goes back, as it seems to me, in large measure 
to Father Hecker and his early collaboration.” 
(Introduction to the Life of Father Hecker.) 
Isaac Thomas Hecker was born in New York 
in 1819 and inherited something of a mystical 
and ascetic temperament from his mother who 
was a devout Methodist. He took orders in 
the Catholic Church, was dismissed from the 
Redemptorist order of which he was a member 
and straightway founded the order of the Paulists 
of which he was the superior, and in 1865 estab¬ 
lished the Catholic World. The chief object of his 
order was the commendation of the Catholic faith 
to the non-Catholie world. He approached his 
task from the point of view of a native-born Amer¬ 
ican with a minimum of interest in medieval the¬ 
ology, ancient religious forms, and the passive vir¬ 
tues of the religious recluse. He sought to bring 
the Catholic faith into thorough harmony with 
American life. The fundamental notes of his 
preachings were social and democratic. 

The disciples of Hecker were never numerous; 
at the turn of the century the Paulists numbered 
hardly more than a dozen. But their influence was 


178 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


far and away out of proportion to their numbers. 
For they were consecrated to the imperative task 
of overcoming the national prejudice against the 
Catholic Church. They sought to remove the bar¬ 
riers that were preventing the Catholics from be¬ 
coming an integral part of the American nation. 
The success they attained inspired many of the 
Catholic clergy, not members of the Paulist order. 
To be sure, the reactionaries dubbed them the 
“Catholic Yankees/’ but by the end of the third 
quarter of the century, thanks largely to the 
influence of Hecker’s followers, Catholicism in this 
country began to assume a distinctly American 
air. Either directly connected with the movement 
set going by Hecker or sympathetic with it were 
the most distinguished prelates of American 
Catholicism. Cardinal Gibbons, the greatest of 
native-born American Catholics, paid him high 
tribute. Archbishop Ireland, perhaps the most 
intensely American member of this group, ac¬ 
knowledges the inspiration he gained from Father 
Hecker. Archbishop Keane, the first head of the 
Catholic University at Washington, was a novice 
of the Paulists. Thomas O’Gorman, Professor in 
the Catholic University, was a member of this 
society. The able Archbishop of Peoria, John 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 179 

Lancaster Spalding, was an intimate friend of the 
Panlists. 

The Catholic Church and the American people 
owe an incalculable debt to these able and pa¬ 
triotic leaders of the American movement. With 
tact and courage they guided their people through 
the storm and stress of Apaism. By their acts as 
well as by their public utterances they did much 
to convince the mass of non-Catholic Americans 
that loyalty to the Catholic Church and loyalty to 
the American flag are not incompatible terms. 
Their Americanism was above reproach. The 
ignorant and bigoted Klan leaders, as well as 
many intolerant Protestant pastors, would do well 
to familiarize themselves with the utterances of 
these Catholic leaders. Cardinal Gibbons, on the 
occasion of his acceptance of the Cardinal’s hat 
at Rome in 1887, remarked, “I say with a feeling 
of profound pride and gratitude that I belong to 
a country where the civil government extends over 
us the aegis of its protection without interfering 
with the legitimate exercise of our mission as 
ministers of the Gospel of Christ. ,, This same 
Catholic leader closes his noteworthy address, 
“The Church and the Republic,’’ with these 
words, “American Catholics rejoice in our sepa- 


180 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


ration of church and state; and I can conceive of 
no combination of circumstances likely to arise 
which would make a union desirable either to 
church or state.’’ 

Bishop Spalding, in answer to the charge of the 
Apaists that the Catholics are the foes of the 
public schools, says: u In a country such as ours 
no other system of state schools seems to be pos¬ 
sible and we are openly and without reserve in 
favor of free schools, and, consequently, in favor 
of a school tax. For my part—and I think I ex¬ 
press the Catholic view—I not only would not, 
had I the power, destroy the public school system, 
but would leave nothing undone to develop and 
perfect it” (“Catholicism and Apaism,” North 
American Review, Vol. 159, p. 286). Archbishop 
Ireland in an eloquent address delivered in 1895 
said: “Let me say this to Catholic Americans: Be 
Americans in the best and truest sense of the word 
American. Love America, love her institutions; 
be devoted to her interests, quick to defend her, 
slow to criticize her. In the past the Church in 
America, due to the necessity of circumstances, 
was alien in appearance and accent. It would be 
ridiculous to say that she did not suffer from it. 
In order to remove or to forestall every mistake, 
every suspicion, we must for the love of church 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 181 

and country almost exaggerate in our hearts and 
emphasize in our lives our Americanism. We 
must not make a gesture nor pronounce a word 
which can be made a pretext for the belief that 
we are not in intimate accord with our country. ’ ’ 
(Re-translated from the French of Houtin, op. 
cit., p. 163.) 

The liberal and nationalist movement within 
the Catholic Church met with determined opposi¬ 
tion which emerged in most pronounced fashion, 
perhaps, in connection with the language question 
in the Catholic schools in the late eighties. The 
Catholic clergy, in their desire to maintain a cen¬ 
sorship upon the thinking of the faithful, have as 
a rule favored small and local language groups 
rather than the universal languages in which are 
written the great masterpieces, often dangerous 
to orthodox faith. For this reason apparently the 
French priests have sought to retain local lan¬ 
guages such as the Basque, the Breton, the Flem¬ 
ish, and the Alsatian patois. So long as the teach¬ 
ing is done in these languages the pupils remain 
safe from the poison of a Renan or a Voltaire. 
Many of the Catholic clergy of America seemed 
inclined at first to follow a similar policy with the 
immigrant groups under their charge. They re¬ 
marked that the immigrants who learned English 


182 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 

were in danger of becoming Protestants or of fall¬ 
ing into religious indifference or unbelief. They 
insisted, therefore, that the children of the immi¬ 
grants should be taught in the language of their 
parents. The German Catholics took the lead in 
this sectarian and un-American attitude on the 
language issue. They were opposed by the Irish 
Catholics who were zealous for speedy American¬ 
ization. The Irish accused the Germans of lack 
of loyalty towards their new fatherland. The 
Germans replied by accusing the Irish of 4 4 Ameri¬ 
canism,’ J which now came to be a comprehensive 
term by which the reactionary Catholic group 
characterized the new liberal and nationalist 
movement. 

The language controversy became so serious 
that it attracted the attention of the Vatican and 
added a new word to the language, 44 Cahensly- 
ism,” which Webster’s International defines as 
44 A plan proposed to the Pope in 1891 by P. P. 
Cahensly, a member of the German parliament, 
to divide the foreign-born population of the 
United States, for ecclesiastical purposes, accord¬ 
ing to European nationalities, and to appoint 
bishops and priests of like race and speaking the 
same language as the majority of the members of 
a diocese or congregation. ” Under the leader- 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 183 

ship of Bishop Keane and other “Americanists” 
this move was defeated. 

The national and liberal movement in American 
Catholicism, which triumphed in the language 
controversy, was responsible for the creation of 
a Catholic university at Washington, the founda¬ 
tion stone of which was laid in 1888 in the pres¬ 
ence of Cardinal Gibbons and the president of 
the republic, Bishop Spalding delivering the chief 
address. Americanism reached something like a 
culmination in the part played by Catholics in the 
Chicago Exposition and the Parliament of Re¬ 
ligions in 1893. Under liberal leadership the 
Catholics were winning the respect and confidence 
of all intelligent Americans and that in spite of 
the bitter opposition of Apaism. 

Just when liberal Catholic Americanism seemed 
to have won for itself a clear field in this country 
it was tottering to its fall. The liberal movement 
had considered itself fortunate in that it arose 
under the rule of the cultured and tactful Pope 
Leo XIII whom American Catholics praised as 
the Pope designed by Providence to reconcile 
the modern world to Catholicism. It appears, 
however, that even Pope Leo XIII began in time 
to fear and distrust Americanism. His official 
historian wrote in 1894, “It cannot be denied that 


184? 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


great dangers menace the Church in the United 
States because of the spirit of independence in¬ 
nate in the soul of every American. ’ ’ The quarrel 
between the liberal and reactionary parties crept 
into the Catholic University at Washington with 
most unfortunate results. The liberals were led 
by the rector, Keane, the reactionaries by the two 
professors of German extraction, Schroeder and 
Pohle, the former becoming the real leader of the 
Cahensly party. The Irish-American element in 
the university made the atmosphere very uncom¬ 
fortable for Schroeder. Finally in September, 
1896, Leo XIII notified Rector Keane that he was 
deposed. This exhibition of autocratic power 
over the life and thought of American citizens by 
a foreigner created a profound stir in the intel¬ 
lectual life not only of the Catholic Church but 
of the nation. A meeting was held in Carroll In¬ 
stitute, Washington, in which men and women of 
all faiths joined to express their respect for the 
deposed rector. At this meeting a speaker de¬ 
clared, 4 ‘ It is Bishop Rector Keane who first made 
me understand what is an American Catholic. 
All my life I have heard the Roman Catholic de¬ 
scribed as a man imbued in the matter of per¬ 
sonal and national liberty with ideas that are 
strange and medieval. . . . But here is a man en- 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 185 


dowed with the veritable American spirit. This 
in his invincible logic: our institutions are free 
institutions; they must dominate the world; they 
are impossible without liberty of speech and lib¬ 
erty in the schools. Therefore we must have free 
speech and free schools.” 

The attitude of the Catholic liberals towards 
this move of Leo XIII is exceedingly suggestive. 
Bishop Keane read publicly the pontifical letter 
removing him from office and his own reply, add¬ 
ing these words, “I do not ask reasons; I beg you, 
my friends, and you, students, do as I have done. 
Do not ask why the Holy Father has done this. It 
is sufficient that he has done it for it to have been 
done wisely and well. ,, The prelate then with¬ 
drew to a sanatorium in California, presumably 
to rest his shattered nerves. A year later in a 
sermon in Washington, Archbishop Ireland made 
use of this language: “Those who are stubborn 
and rebellious against Leo XIII are to be found 
outside of France. They are to be found where- 
they are least to be expected—in America. There 
are naturally divisions among the Catholics of 
America, not in regard to truth in matters of 
faith and morals but in the tendencies and move¬ 
ments and in the adjustments to modern circum¬ 
stances and environment. There should be for us 


186 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


but one tendency, one movement, one method of 
adjustment, those indicated by Leo. Separation 
from Leo, opposition to his directions, is nothing 
else than rebellion no matter what the efforts to 
dissimulate in America, as in France, under the 
specious names of conservatism, traditional Ca¬ 
tholicism, religious fear of innovations. Those who 
resist in America the direction indicated by Leo 
are rebels though they claim to be the only true 
and loyal Catholics. The loyal Catholics have but 
one name, Catholics. They have but one rule of 
action, the will and the example of Leo. . . . 
When I withdraw from Catholics it is because they 
are stubborn. When the French Catholics are 
with the Pope I am with the French Catholics; 
when they are against him I am against them. 
When the German Catholics are with the Pope, I 
am with them; when they are against the Pope, I 
am against them.” (Re-translated from the 
French of Albert Houtin, L’Americcmisme, p. 
153.) Thus was the issue joined between the Pope 
and the nationalistic and liberal element in Ameri¬ 
can Catholicism, and—Rome won. 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 187 


IV 

In the light of this sketch of American Catholi¬ 
cism what shall we say of the aspersions made 
by the Klan against its fellow citizens of the 
Catholic faith? In the first place, it must be said 
that the Klan shows gross and unpardonable ig¬ 
norance of the actual facts of the history of 
American Catholicism. It is unaware that within 
the circle of the Catholic Church the problem of 
Americanism has been fought out, especially in 
connection with the language question, and that 
American Catholics have proven their American¬ 
ism by their deeds. In the second place, the Klan 
and its abettors have been cruelly and stupidly 
unjust towards their fellow citizens of the Catho¬ 
lic faith in that they hold them personally re¬ 
sponsible for the persecutions and misdeeds of 
the past. It is just as logical to blame the de¬ 
scendants of the Puritans for witch-burning as to 
blame Catholics of to-day for the Spanish Inquisi¬ 
tion. Cardinal Gibbons has repudiated in public 
print the crimes of the Inquisition; they cannot 
be laid at the door of American Catholicism. 
Again, the Klan and its supporters have laid 
themselves open to the charge that in spite of their 
boasted championship of American liberties, 


188 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

American Catholics and not the Klan are the real 
supporters of religious freedom. So far as the 
surface facts of this unfortunate situation are 
concerned, many Catholics have far greater right 
to be called one hundred percent American than 
the leaders of the Klan. Finally, there is no more 
preposterous assumption than that put forward 
T>y Klan leaders to the effect that the Catholic 
Church is a menace to the sovereignty of the 
American nation. “Our obedience to the Pope,” 
says Bishop Spalding, “is confined to the domain 
of religious faith, morals, and discipline; and 
since the state, with us at least, claims no jurisdic¬ 
tion over such matters, there can be no question 
of conflict. We have, and none are more thankful 
for it than the Catholics, a separation of the 
church from the state. . . . The Pope has never 
attempted to interfere in the civil or political af¬ 
fairs of this country, and were he to attempt to 
do so his action would be resented by the Catho¬ 
lics more quickly than by others” (North Ameri¬ 
can Review, Vol. 159, p. 284). 

To bear witness to the unimpeachable patriot¬ 
ism of American Catholics, however, and to con¬ 
demn the stupid bigotry of the Klan does not ex¬ 
haust the situation. It does not explain, for ex¬ 
ample, why for the best part of a hundred years 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 189 

these anti-Catholic movements have arisen to 
trouble American life. It does not explain why 
thousands of intelligent Americans who repudiate 
the brutal intolerance of the Klan sympathize in 
their hearts with its anti-Catholicism. It does not 
explain why similar anti-Catholic movements 
have arisen in other countries such as “anti- 
clericalisme’’ in France and the famous Kultur- 
Jcampf of the days of Bismarck in Germany. 

Rev. W. R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s, London, 
who can hardly be accused of affiliations with the 
Ku Klux Klan, makes the following animadver¬ 
sions upon European Catholicism: “On the whole 
it can hardly be denied that it has been a failure. 
It does not seem to have raised the moral tone 
of society in the countries which have adopted it, 
except perhaps in such Arcadian communities as 
Oberammergau and in some very limited circles 
living an old-fashioned life under priestly direc¬ 
tion. It has shown all the defects of despotism— 
a costly and luxurious central government, neces¬ 
sitating heavy taxation and the ruthless suppres¬ 
sion of all movements towards freedom. This 
kind of oppression is peculiarly searching and 
tyrannical under a theocracy because it lays its 
hands not only on overt acts, but upon all liberty 
of thought. To think for one’s self in matters 


190 THE KU KLTJX KLAN 

which concern our eternal interest is rebellion or 
treason. The faithful are forbidden to read cer¬ 
tain books and to join certain societies; they 
must submit their consciences to periodical ex¬ 
amination by an official; the education of their 
children is taken out of their hands and is strictly 
regulated by the hierarchy. An acute conflict of 
loyalties is set up between Church and State; no 
Catholic is more than conditionally a patriot, and 
the conditions are of the political and not of the 
moral order. . . . Conscience is stifled; and the 
Catholic is curiously impervious to that lay mo¬ 
rality which with all its defects generally embodies 
the best features of a national character. These 
defects are, of course, not in any way connected 
v&th the Christian religion; they are the defects 
of theocratic autocracy in its Catholic form . . . 
This experiment is not played out; it may even 
have a great future if, as is probable, the present 
riot of nationalism is followed by a struggle be¬ 
tween two or more types of internationalism. 
But it has certainly not solved the problem of hu¬ 
man government.’ ’ ( Outspoken Essays, second 

series, p. 111.) 

I am not concerned here to pronounce upon the 
justice of these strictures of “the gloomy dean” 

1 The italics are the author’s. 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 191 


upon the Catholic Church. They hardly apply, 
without some modifications, to American Ca¬ 
tholicism. What is important for present pur¬ 
poses is the dean’s assertion that the genius of 
the Catholic Church centers around the fact that 
it is a 1 ‘ theocratic autocracy. ’ ’ The dramatic sur¬ 
render of the leaders of liberal American Catholi¬ 
cism to the will of Pope Leo XIII when he removed 
Bishop Keane from the rectorship of the Catholic 
University and Archbishop Ireland’s eloquent 
glorification of “the will of Leo” indicate beyond 
a doubt that American Catholicism is likewise a 
“theocratic autocracy.” That is to say, the su¬ 
preme law of this vast super-national organiza¬ 
tion is vested in the will of the Pope as the vice¬ 
gerent of God on earth. The one doctrine which 
Father Hecker and his followers of the Catholic 
liberal party seemed inclined to stress was that 
of Papal infallibility. It follows, therefore, that 
in any discussion of the troublous question of 
Catholicism and nationalism we must start with 
this fact of the theocratic and autocratic nature 
of the Catholic Church. It will be found to throw 
much light upon the attitudes of devout Catholics 
upon all matters, national, educational, social, 
moral, as well as religious. 

About a year after the close of the war the 


192 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


Catholic hierarchy of America met as a body at 
the Catholic University in Washington and issued 
a pastoral letter. Touching in that letter upon 
the perturbed post-war conditions this statement 
was made: “It is imperative that we recognize in 
God the source of justice and right; in his law the 
sovereign rule of life; in the destiny he has ap¬ 
pointed for us the ultimate standard by which all 
values are fixed and determined / 9 Without en¬ 
tering into the difficult questions as to what God’s 
law is, how we are to give it practical formula¬ 
tion, and how we are to base upon it the vast and 
complex machinery of civil law, we have here 
obviously a formulation of the Catholic social ideal 
in theocratic terms. On the surface, this theo¬ 
cratic statement of the social ideal tallies with 
that of orthodox Protestantism which finds in 
God’s revealed will the source of all law and 
justice. There is, however, this fundamental dif¬ 
ference. Since the breakdown of the Calvinistic 
theocracies of Geneva and New England the social 
ideal of Protestantism has always remained more 
of a “counsel of perfection” than a concrete so¬ 
cial program. The strict separation of church 
and state in America has forced Protestantism 
to assume an inspirational rather than a practical 
role. The influence of the Church is moral and 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 193 


spiritual, rather than practical or political. The 
result of all this is that the ethics of politics, busi¬ 
ness, education, or science has become thoroughly- 
secularized. That is to say, we have built up 
within these various groups a body of ethical 
norms which, while not necessarily antagonistic to, 
are at least non-committal on religion. This does 
not mean to say that teacher, business man, poli¬ 
tician, or scientist may not be deeply religious. 
But so far as the ethical sanctions that govern 
these various occupations are concerned, they are 
primarily secular rather than religious in nature. 

The essentially theocratic nature of the Roman 
Catholic Church does not permit this separation 
of the secular and the religious. The formulation 
of the social ideal can never be for the Catholic a 
mere “counsel of perfection.” To exist at all it 
must find some concrete institutional form. A re¬ 
ligious ideal of society that is not actually incar¬ 
nated in institutions, or does not imply as its cor¬ 
relative possible institutional formulation, is from 
the Catholic point of view unthinkable and non¬ 
existent. Here, then, we have a fundamental dif¬ 
ference between the genius of Catholicism which 
is essentially Latin and the genius of Protestant¬ 
ism which is subjective, spiritual, and individual¬ 
istic, or if you please, Anglo-Saxon. For histori- 


194 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


cal Protestantism “the kingdom of God is within 
you” and its external manifestations are more 
or less accidental. The mental attitude is the im¬ 
portant thing. For the Catholic the kingdom of 
God is both within you and without you but the 
latter or the institutional formulation is the im¬ 
portant thing. Inner attitudes are created, safe¬ 
guarded, made practical by fixed external regula¬ 
tions in sacraments, cultus, educational system, or 
ecclesiastical polity. 

It is possible to liken the historic Catholic 
Church to the Gothic cathedral, the most beautiful 
artistic product of the Catholic faith. The es¬ 
sence of the Gothic as opposed to the Romanesque 
structure is its principle of balanced thrusts. 
Around this great architectonic principle are ar¬ 
ranged flying buttresses, pointed arches, fluted 
pillars, stained glass windows, and soaring nave. 
While this basic architectural principle remains 
fixed there is often the greatest variety and plasti¬ 
city in the arrangement of details. Contrast, for 
example, the Doric simplicity of Notre Dame de 
Paris with the flamboyant richness of the cathe¬ 
dral of Rheims, now, alas, a ruin! Like the Gothic 
cathedral the Catholic Church has one great archi¬ 
tectonic principle, its theocratic structure, of 
which the doctrine of papal infallibility is merely 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 195 


the logical expression. The secret of the marvel¬ 
lous success with which this church has adapted 
herself to diverse climes and civilizations is 
to be found in her ability to permit the greatest 
freedom and variety in matters of detail while 
maintaining her essentially theocratic structure. 
Witness the skill with which she has adapted her¬ 
self to the free institutions of this country with¬ 
out sacrificing her basic principle or even sug¬ 
gesting that it is incompatible with the genius of 
democracy. It is only when she fears this basic 
principle is endangered, as apparently in the case 
of Bishop Keane and the Catholic liberals, that 
she reluctantly reveals her essentially autocratic 
nature. 


v 

What are some of the practical implications of 
the foregoing remarks for the problem of Catho¬ 
licism and Americanism! They imply, first, that 
every Catholic who is at the same time a patriotic 
American and a devout subject of the Pope must 
be an opportunist on the question of the separation 
of church and state. That is to say, the patriotic 
Catholic, viewing the unprecedented prosperity of 
his church in this country under a regime of sepa¬ 
ration of church and state and realizing that this 


196 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


separation is directly responsible for this pros¬ 
perity and realizing furthermore that anything 
else is impossible, accepts the situation gladly and 
proclaims his hearty assent to this fundamental 
principle of Americanism. At the same time, if 
he reflects upon the genius of his church, he must 
realize that the theocratic social ideal which the 
papacy has never relinquished presupposes the 
union of church and state. Thus Cardinal Gib¬ 
bons, who closed his address, “The Church and 
the Republic,’’ with the statement, “American 
Catholics rejoice in our separation of church and 
state,” in which statement he is undoubtedly sin¬ 
cere, likewise said in this same address that a 
union of church and state is “ideally best.” Such 
union is “ideally best” in that it carries out the 
logic of the essentially theocratic structure of the 
Catholic Church and best realizes its social ideal. 

Again in the matter of religious liberty, and tol¬ 
eration the devout Catholic pursues an opportu¬ 
nistic policy. The Klansman has foolishly allowed 
himself to be jockeyed into the position in which 
he is, in actual fact, the opponent of tolerance 
while his Catholic adversary is really its cham¬ 
pion. It is the logic of circumstances, however, 
rather than devotion to the principle of toleration 
that determines the Catholic attitude. The de- 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 197 


vout Catholic for whom the immediate practical 
problem is his status in American democracy has 
no other choice than to champion religious tolera¬ 
tion. For he is well aware that the principle of 
religious toleration has been of incalculable value 
to him in finding a foothold in a country essen¬ 
tially Protestant and traditionally prejudiced 
against all things Catholic. The principle of tol¬ 
eration, however, is hardly compatible with 
a theocratic autocracy. Catholicism has only 
admitted tolerance as a matter of expediency, 
never as a moral principle of the intellectual and 
spiritual life. In his encyclical of November 1, 
1885, Leo XIII states, “Although the Church does 
not concede that every kind of divine worship is 
lawful by the same right as the true religion, 
nevertheless she does not condemn those rulers of 
commonwealths who, for the sake of some great 
good to be gained or evil to be avoided, permit, in 
toleration, according to the manners and usages 
of the country, each kind of religious profession 
to have its place. ” 

A Catholic writer has interpreted the Pope’s 
encyclical to mean that the Catholic Church can 
never admit “that every religion has intrinsically 
equal rights” for the simple reason that her faith 
is true while other faiths are false. It follows, 


198 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


therefore, that for tolerance in the sense of “a 
system that dispenses the same level measure of 
commendation to all religions, a doctrine that pro¬ 
claims all religious professions of equal worth 
and equal right before God and as far as salva¬ 
tion is concerned, the Church has nothing but 
reprobation.” (Rev. T. Brosnahan, S. J., Dona- 
hoe’s Magazine , Jan. 1894). Such a position, pat¬ 
ently at variance with the traditional American 
conception of tolerance, is obviously the logical 
result of the dominant idea of theocratic absolut¬ 
ism. For granting that there is but one true 
Church of which the Pope is the head, that this 
church is the sole depository of divine saving 
truth, it follows that it is the duty of this church 
to proclaim herself as the infallible guide of sin¬ 
ful men and to warn against other false faiths. 
Tolerance then becomes a sin. It is not supposed 
for once that the average American of Catholic 
persuasion acts upon such a doctrine. It remains 
in abeyance just as do similar “hard” doctrines 
of orthodox Protestantism. Patriotic American 
Catholics are too thoroughly convinced of the 
practical value of tolerance for their own church 
ever to challenge it. 

Now when we throw together in a free demo¬ 
cratic society two types of religion, one of which 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 199 


accepts religious tolerance as a vital principle of 
society, the other as a mere matter of expediency 
and hence to be repudiated when circumstances 
require it, we get a very interesting situation. 
Tolerance for Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian 
means a fair field and the right to compete with 
other sects for the religious loyalties of men. 
Tolerance for the Catholic Church, not neces¬ 
sarily intentionally but in actual practice, means 
merely license for carrying out the logic of a theo¬ 
cratic autocracy. Protestantism thus finds itself 
in competition with a church which does not ac¬ 
cept the rule of a fair field except as a matter of 
expediency, that does not treat the various 
forms of Protestantism as legitimate rivals but 
as erroneous and dangerous deviations from 
the true faith and therefore to be eradicated. 
The situation is of course intensified by the 
fact that Protestantism is nationalistic, divided, 
and unorganized while the Catholic Church 
is essentially a militant international organiza¬ 
tion and enabled by virtue of a vast hierarchy ut¬ 
terly loyal to the Pope to pursue its aims inde¬ 
pendent of national conditions and thus to utilize 
all its forces in the most effective fashion. Under 
these circumstances Protestant antipathy to Ca¬ 
tholicism does not seem wholly without justifica- 


200 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


tion. These facts must be honestly faced before 
we condemn offhand the anti-Catholicism of ‘the 
Klan. 

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude 
from the foregoing remarks that there is no place 
in the theocratic ideal of Catholicism for liberty. 
Cardinal Gibbons, whose patriotism and intel¬ 
lectual honesty will hardly be challenged, claims 
that the papacy is the mightiest ally of freedom. 
In the past, he asserts, “The popes were on the 
side of liberty and the people, against the despot¬ 
ism of the crown. The papacy was then univer¬ 
sally considered the embodiment of justice and 
liberty upon earth.’’ It follows, therefore, that 
“in an age of democracy and liberty some grati¬ 
tude might be expected for the most powerful de¬ 
fender of the people and of liberty; yet the very 
success of the papacy in their defence is the 
ground of the prejudice that exists against it” 
{op. cit. p. 226). Such language is highly enig¬ 
matical until we make clear the notion of liberty it 
presupposes. The idea of liberty has two phases. 
Considered from the institutional point of view a 
nation is free when it is provided with the wisest 
and best laws for the fullest possible development 
of its citizens. Considered from the individual 
point of view a nation is free when it offers the 




THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 201 


largest opportunity for the creative and untram¬ 
melled self-expression of its citizens. The two 
ideas seem contradictory. For how can there be 
free, creative self-expression where one is hedged 
about by law and authority? On the other hand, 
how can we talk intelligibly about self-expression 
except as it finds rational and effective direction 
through the aid of law and authority? If we 
stress the one phase we get anarchy; if we stress 
the other we get despotism. We need the element 
of law and order without which there is no sta¬ 
bility; we need also the element of free, untram¬ 
melled self-expression without which there is no 
progress. The problem of civilization and gov¬ 
ernment is to preserve the happy balance be¬ 
tween these two phases of liberty. 

Cardinal Gibbons, in his references to the con¬ 
tributions of his church to liberty, evidently has 
in mind the institutional and authoritarian phase 
of liberty. If we assume, as does the devout 
Catholic, the theocratic autocracy of the Catholic 
Church, with its closed system of doctrines, laws, 
and ordinances embracing every phase of life 
and providing a final solution for all human 
problems, its infallible interpreter of the mean¬ 
ing and application of those doctrines in the 
Pope, God’s vicegerent on earth, its vast politico- 


202 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

religious supernationalism knit into one effective 
organic whole by a hierarchy absolutely loyal to 
the Pope, its educational system devised to meet 
the needs of this supernationalism rather than the 
needs of the citizens of any one nation and 
planned so to shape the thoughts and acts of the 
individual from the cradle as to make him a happy 
and loyal citizen of this supernation—if we are 
willing to grant these assumptions, then the lan¬ 
guage of Cardinal Gibbons, paradoxical and even 
impertinent as it may sound to the Klansman, is 
perfectly intelligible and justifiable. 

VI 

In the light of the foregoing discussion it is per¬ 
haps possible now for us to state the permanent 
issue that underlies the Klan’s anti-Catholicism. 
The Klan’s attempt to impeach the patriotism of 
the millions of Catholic Americans is absurd and 
cruelly unjust. The Klan’s claim that the Pope is 
making use of the vast organization of which he 
is the head to intermeddle in the political affairs 
of this country is ridiculous and childish. The 
occupants of the chair of Saint Peter have long 
since given up any schemes of political imperial¬ 
ism. The Pope, however, has not relinquished his 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 203 

claim to what may be called a moral and spiritual 
imperialism, that is to say, the sovereign right to 
settle, as the mouthpiece of the living God, all dis¬ 
putes of mankind* at the higher level of their moral 
and religious loyalties. There should be, in the¬ 
ory at least, no conflict between the political 
sovereignty of America and the spiritual sover¬ 
eignty claimed by the Pope over all Christendom 
and actually exercised over some twenty million 
Americans of Catholic faith. These two types 
of sovereignty, however, only avoid a clash in so 
far as the American state, on the one hand, assures 
to all Catholics complete freedom to worship God 
according to the dictates of their consciences and 
in so far as the theocratic absolutism of the pa¬ 
pacy, on the other hand, restricts itself solely to 
the spiritual sphere. 

The danger point in this adjustment of sover¬ 
eignties lies in the fact, already pointed out, that 
the spiritual sovereignty of the papacy, thanks to 
its inherent logic and great historic traditions, is 
constantly seeking concrete institutional form. 
Considered from the point of view of the logic of 
a theocratic autocracy, the parochial school sys¬ 
tem is the natural and necessary instrument for 
assuring to the church a body of believers entirely 
in sympathy with this spiritual sovereignty of the 


204 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


Pope. In the more or less hostile atmosphere of 
our modern industrial democracy the parochial 
school is about the only agency that can assure 
the continuance of that spiritual sovereignty over 
Americans. But the parochial school must also 
perform another task. It must train prospective 
American citizens so as to secure their loyal and 
intelligent acceptance of the political sovereignty 
of the state. The state permits the parochial 
schools only on this assumption. The parochial 
school system, therefore, attempts to train sub¬ 
jects for two types of sovereignties, one moral and 
religious, the other political and secular. It seeks 
to make men and women subject to the Pope in re¬ 
ligious matters and subject to the state in politi¬ 
cal matters. It is the difficulty of blending these 
two sovereignties that makes the parochial school 
system such an anomaly in American society and 
such a bone of contention between the Nativists 
and the Catholics. The Catholic claims the right 
to educate his child in a church school on the 
ground that spiritual sovereignty lies outside the 
sphere of the state; the Nativist, as represented 
by the Klan, claims that a sovereign state should 
train its own future citizens. It is the presence 
of these two sovereignties and the charge that 
they necessitate more or less of a divided allegi- 


THE KLAN AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM 205 


ance on the part of onr Catholic citizenship that 
underlies all anti-Catholic movements, including 
that of the Klan. The charge of divided alle¬ 
giance is doubtless unjust, though the Catholic 
Church emphatically discourages the critical in¬ 
dependence of thought so necessary to citizen¬ 
ship in a democracy. The vast majority of good 
Catholics, to be sure, do not feel that their loy¬ 
alty to the Pope decreases in the slightest their 
loyalty to a democratic state. But so long as 
even this semblance of a divided allegiance exists 
there will not be lacking one hundred percent 
Americans to make it the basis of an attack upon 
Catholicism. We have, therefore, to conclude 
this rather lengthy discussion with the some¬ 
what discouraging remark of the historian quoted 
earlier in this chapter, ‘ ‘ The time-honored Anglo- 
Saxon and Evangelical aspersion of the integrity 
of Catholic citizenship . . . though diminishing 
in force from generation to generation is, never¬ 
theless, liable to recur in years to come” and 
especially “during future flurries of intolerance.” 


* 
























f 














CHAPTER VH 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 

“No state of society or laws can render men so 
much alike,” remarks DeTocqueville, “but that 
education, fortune, and tastes will interpose some 
differences between them. . . . They will, there¬ 
fore, always tend to evade the provisions of legis¬ 
lation, whatever they may be; and departing in 
some respect from the circle within which they 
were to be bound, they will set up, close by the 
great political community, small private circles, 
united together by the similitude of their condi¬ 
tions, habits and manners. ’ ’ It would be expected, 
therefore, that secret fraternal societies would 
early make their appearance in American society 
as a natural means of escape from the standard¬ 
izing effect of conventional democracy. Further¬ 
more, it would seem that the fraternal society 
would be the natural protection of men against 
the dangerous isolation of the individual encour¬ 
aged by the laissez faire democracy of the first 
part of the last century with its strenuous empha- 
207 , 


208 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


sis upon the principle of equality. It is rather 
surprising, therefore, to find that apart from some 
of the older secret societies, such as the Free 
Masons, few secret organizations arose in this 
country before the last quarter of the century. 
At the close of the century eighty-six percent of 
the fraternal orders were only twenty years old. 

i 

Certain conditions in American life at first dis¬ 
couraged the rise of the secret society. Fore¬ 
most among these we must place the inherent an¬ 
tagonism of a highly individualistic pioneer de¬ 
mocracy to secret societies as essentially undemo¬ 
cratic. There was also a lack, at first, of that 
measure of socialization and mutualization of hu¬ 
man relations which the fraternal order seems to 
require. Finally, intense antagonism was aroused 
against all secret societies by an incident which 
happened in Batavia, New York, in 1826. One 
William Morgan incurred thei hostility of the 
Masons by announcing the publication of a book 
revealing their secrets. He was abducted, pre¬ 
sumably by the Masons, and all trace of him dis¬ 
appeared. The indignation aroused by the mys¬ 
terious doom of Morgan became intense and took 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 


209 


on political form. The Masons, it was claimed, 
placed their secret oath above their civic duties 
and were therefore dangerous to good government. 
An anti-Masonic state organization put candidates 
in the field in 1830. In 1832 the anti-Masons as¬ 
sumed the proportions of a national party, nomi¬ 
nating William Wirt for the presidency. This 
antagonism to secret societies was inherited by 
the Whig party which elected Seward governor 
of New York state in 1838 and Harrison president 
in 1840. 

When a large part of the Whig party was ab¬ 
sorbed by the Republican party the anti-Masonic 
tradition was continued in such men as Thurlow 
Weed, Millard Fillmore, and W. H. Seward. The 
reforming moral idealism that lent such initial 
vitality to the Republican party and found its 
strongest expression in the Abolition movement 
had as little place in its social ideal for secret so¬ 
cieties as for the institution of slavery. Wendell 
Phillips, the orator and abolitionist, in a letter to 
Rev. J. P. Stoddard of Boston, March 18th, 1880, 
wrote: “A secret society is wholly out of place 
under democratic institutions. Every secret so¬ 
ciety, so far as it is wide-spread and influential, 
threatens the purity and essence of such institu¬ 
tions and warps them to private ends and class 


210 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


supremacy. Secret societies prevent the impar¬ 
tial execution of the laws and obstruct the neces¬ 
sary and wholesome action of political parties. 
The judge on the bench, the juryman in the box, 
and all the machinery of politics feel the tyranny 
of secret societies. No judge, and no executive 
officer, especially in a republic, can, with any self- 
respect, be a member of a secret society. He lays 
himself open to suspicion, subjects himself to 
dangerous temptation, and sets an evil example.’’ 

The Protestant churches, especially that branch 
of Protestantism closely affiliated with the ideal¬ 
istic and reforming atmosphere of the Abolition 
movement, namely, Congregationalism, added its 
contribution to the opposition to secret societies. 
Deacon Philo Carpenter, a philanthropic Congre- 
gationalist of Chicago, “having come out of the 
anti-Masonic turmoil of New York state, and 
being imbued with the reformatory spirit of that 
revival era,” left a sum of money “to be used in 
opposition to secret societies.” This fund was 
offered in prizes for essays on the relation of se¬ 
cret societies to Christian citizenship and three of 
the best essays were published in 1897 under the 
title “Secrecy and Citizenship.” Their authors 
were Congregational ministers. The opposition 
of the church to secret societies as expressed in 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 


211 


these essays is political, moral, and religious. It 
is argued that secret societies are inimical to free 
democratic institutions because ‘ ‘ citizenship in a 
free state seeks the equal welfare of all the mem¬ 
bers of the same, the strong and the weak alike, 
the grown men, the women and the little children, 
the dependent and the fortunate, the able and the 
defective. . . . But an oath-bound, exclusive, se¬ 
cret society—whether a monastery, a convent, a 
lodge of Jesuits or of Free Masons, the Mafia, or 
the Clan-na-Gael, or whatsoever else refusing to 
permit the state, that is the whole people, to know 
its purposes and methods, closed in by hostile and 
repelling barriers, shutting out the state and its 
representatives as such—not only has no place as 
a friendly and essential body within the state, but 
is contrary to the purpose and character of all 
those other groups, which make up the essential 
parts of the state” (Secrecy and Citizenship , p. 
20 f.). 

It is argued, in the second place, that secret so¬ 
cieties are immoral because “no man can bind 
himself by oath or pledge to keep secret what he 
does not yet know without thereby bartering away 
his moral freedom. This is the fundamental error 
in all the secret orders which vitiates everything 
in connection with them. . . . What the individual 


212 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


has thus pledged himself to keep secret may 
prove, when he comes to it, to be a legitimate ob¬ 
ject of secrecy, but he did not know this when 
he made his oath. If, on the contrary, the things 
which he learns, as he goes forward, prove to be 
iniquitous or for other reasons deserving pub¬ 
licity he finds himself bound, in the most emphatic 
way, by his own promise, not to divulge them. 
He must, therefore, either violate the plainest de¬ 
mands of his conscience and abide by his oath of 
secrecy or obey the present behests of duty, make 
known the things which he has learned, and 
thereby confess the sin committed in the begin- 
ning ,, {op, cit., p. 54 f.). This situation “inevita¬ 
bly induces a degree of moral blindness and in¬ 
difference to duty,” and it “creates among the 
members of the orders a habit of concealment, an 
indirectness of speech amounting often to actual 
falsehood; the result is permanent impairment of 
the sense of truth and of truthful expression.” 

Finally, secret orders, it is alleged, are funda¬ 
mentally un-Christian, for “the first element in a 
Christian life is personal loyalty to Jesus Christ 
as Saviour, Teacher, and Lord. Every form of 
oath-bound secrecy involves disloyalty to him in 
some of these aspects. One can not become a 
member of the simplest and relatively best of the 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 


213 


secret societies without violating some of his 
teachings about light, openness of character, pu¬ 
rity of association, avoidance of oaths, universal 
love and brotherhood ’ 9 (op. tit., p. 68). The 
secret society is also inimical to orthodox faith. 
“No religious tenets must be tolerated that would 
trouble the devotee of any religious system or 
even press upon the conscience of the irreligious 
too closely. The very nature of the secret growth, 
along the lines which it lays down, and of which 
it boasts, tends to narrow down all religious con¬ 
victions to the vanishing point, that the most 
diverse elements religiously may be grouped as 
brothers of the mystic bond” (op. tit., p. 106). 
This objection would of course apply to the Ma¬ 
sons more oppositely than to the modern Ku 
Klux Klan, which finds its staunchest supporters 
among those of the Fundamentalist persuasion. 

To the opposition of the political idealist and the 
religious reformer of the Protestant type to secret 
societies must be added the historic antagonism of 
the Roman Catholic Church. This antagonism 
dates from the famous bull of Pope Clement XII 
in 1738 against Freemasonry, the first of a long 
series of fulminations of the Catholic Church 
against secret orders of all sorts. The attitude of 
the Catholic Church in this country towards se- 


214 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


cret societies was formulated January 6, 1895, by 
the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cincinnati, ap¬ 
parently with the sanction of the Holy See. This 
pronunciamento was directed primarily against 
the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and the 
Sons of Temperance, but included all similar se¬ 
cret orders. They were condemned, first because 
they tend to lead Catholics to Freemasonry which 
is “under the absolute condemnation and excom¬ 
munication of the Church” and indulges in a “Sa¬ 
tanic warfare against everything Christian,” sec¬ 
ondly, because they “weaken a Catholic’s regard 
for the doctrines of the Church” and “inculcate 
morality without the help of the Church,” and, 
thirdly, because Catholics who join these secret 
orders tend to become “cool in their loyalty to 
the Church.” 

The real basis of the opposition of the Catholic 
Church to secret societies is suggested by the 
Catholic writer, Rev. J. W. Book, in his little 
work, A Thousand and One Objections to Secret 
Societies , published in 1893 with the imprimatur 
of the Church authorities. The book is cast in the 
form of a dialogue between a priest and a young 
man who seeks light on the question of joining 
secret societies. The priest justifies the antago¬ 
nism of his church to all secret societies and 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 


215 


especially oath-bound societies on the ground 
that “by a divine right the Church has charge of 
souls and consequently she has a right to know 
what they are doing and how they are doing it. 
But how can she judge of the lawfulness of an act 
if it is not submitted to her judgment V 9 In other 
words, it is a fundamental thesis of the philosophy 
of the Roman Catholic Church that she is ap¬ 
pointed by God to be the keeper of the consciences 
of the faithful. There can be no secrets between 
the individual and his spiritual guardian, the 
Church. 

On the whole, it can hardly be said that the 
Catholic Church has been entirely consistent in 
its attitude towards secret societies. It has re¬ 
fused to condemn the Knights of Labor and the 
Grand Army of the Republic, both secret orders 
with grips and passwords. It is of course obvi¬ 
ous that any condemnation of these orders, espe¬ 
cially the latter, would raise the ugly question as 
to whether loyalty to the church should take prece¬ 
dence over loyalty to country, an issue which 
American Catholics have as a rule studiously 
avoided. There has been no serious opposition 
to Catholic students’ joining college fraternities. 
Finally, it would appear that secrecy is condemned 
not because of its inherent evils but because it 


216 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

militates against the interest of the church. The 
famous Constitutions and special papal privileges 
enjoyed by the members of the Jesuit Order were 
kept secret, the members not being allowed to 
show these documents to outsiders. There were 
doubtless reasons of policy for this, such as the 
desire not to antagonize other non-secret Catholic 
orders that did not enjoy like papal privileges. 
To be sure, these secret documents have long 
since become public property, thanks to the sup¬ 
pression of the order and the seizure of its papers 
towards the close of the eighteenth century. But 
the fact remains that the church authorities did 
sanction its secret methods and later abolished 
the order mainly through the pressure of public 
sentiment. The order was revived by a bull of 
Pope Pius VII in 1814 and still exists. 

Here, if anywhere, we are to find some slight 
justification for the bitter opposition of the Klan 
to the powerful Catholic secret society, the 
Knights of Columbus. The Klan’s brutal accusa¬ 
tions against this society are of course absurd. 
There is not the slightest ground for the belief 
that this order, whose Americanism is abundantly 
proven by its splendid war record, has ever lent 
its influence to concerted secret efforts, political 
or otherwise, inimical to the integrity of the na- 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 


217 


tion’s life. The charge of the Klan that the 
Knights of Columbus are seeking to subject 
America to the rule of the Pope is the sheerest 
nonsense. At the same time the memory of the 
secret activities of the famous Jesuit Order, re¬ 
vived by Pius VII in 1814 and still active, when 
taken in connection with the remarkable growth 
of the Knights of Columbus, the more or less 
secret character of this order and its avowed 
loyalty to the Holy Father and the Church, suffice 
to bring it constantly under the watchful and 
jealous eye of its Protestant rivals. 

n 

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the 
opposition to secret societies gradually waned. 
Fraternal organizations, largely secret, increased 
by leaps and bounds. Of some 568 fraternal or¬ 
ders in existence in 1900 only seventy-eight ante¬ 
dated the year 1880. Between the years 1880 and 
1895, 490 of these fraternal orders arose. Any 
sketch of the social life of this nation to-day must 
give due importance to the fact that over seven 
percent of our population belongs to some frater¬ 
nal order. These societies, six hundred and more 
in number, present a diversity of religious, polit- 


218 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


ical, racial and cultural elements in our civiliza¬ 
tion that is bewildering in its complexity. The 
secret society is no longer challenged as in the 
past on the ground that it is inimical to moral, re¬ 
ligious, or political loyalties. Contrast, for ex¬ 
ample, the attitude towards the Freemasons in 
1830 with the reception accorded the Shriners by 
the capital city of the nation June, 1923, when 
hundreds of thousands of members of this secret 
order preempted its streets and hotels and prac¬ 
tically forced a suspension of the normal life of 
the city for a week. The citizens of Washington 
vied with each other in extending to the members 
of this secret society the utmost limits of their 
hospitality. On the wind-shields of their cars pri¬ 
vate citizens pasted the invitation “Hop in, 
Noble.” The federal government gave to its em¬ 
ployees a half-holiday that they might witness the 
Shriner parade. The secret societies have be¬ 
come important factors in American life. Great 
American cities compete for the honor of enter¬ 
taining their conventions. The spirit of Wendell 
Phillips is to-day little more than a pious tra¬ 
dition. 

Most remarkable has been the spread of the fra¬ 
ternal beneficiary societies, the godfather of which 
was Upchurch, a worker of Meadville, Pennsyl- 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 219 

vania, who in 1868 organized the Ancient Order 
of United Workmen and provided the model for 
many later organizations. It is no accident that 
these societies began their rapid rise about the 
year 1880. For this year marks the dropping of 
the frontier line from the census and the organi¬ 
zation of the Standard Oil Trust, two facts indi¬ 
cating that America had made the transition from 
the old individualistic pioneer democracy of ear¬ 
lier days to the highly centralized and interde¬ 
pendent industrial society of the present, domi¬ 
nated by the big business corporation. The era 
of “big business’’ bore especially hard upon the 
wage-earning class. It was forced to arm itself 
with protective measures in order to survive. 
The fraternal beneficiary society, like the trades- 
union, was created by this class to assure to itself 
a more permanent status in the new order of 
things. Secrecy, in so far as it is made use of by 
these fraternal beneficiary societies, is little more 
than a means of safeguarding members against 
impostors and those who seek to exploit them. 
Signs, grips, passwords, and the like secret para¬ 
phernalia obviously serve the useful purpose of 
enabling members of these orders to identify each 
other wherever they meet, thus assuring them¬ 
selves that the aid given or the friendship ex- 


220 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


tended is not abused. There is nothing in this 
form of secrecy inimical to public welfare or in¬ 
jurious to religion or morals. The secret features 
are in fact subordinated to the socially valuable 
ends for which the society is organized. Oaths, 
in so far as they are used, are merely means for 
inducing the individual member to live up to the 
full measure of his responsibilities as delimited 
by the purposes of the order. 

Equally important, however, with the economic 
benefits of the secret society is the role it has 
played in the social life of America. To appreci¬ 
ate what this role is we must remind ourselves 
that the real texture of American social life is to 
be found, not in the large cities with their welter 
of racial groups nor in the great industrial cen¬ 
ters, where the blue sky overhead and the daily 
wage seem to be the only bonds that unite men, 
but in the small town. The spirit of the small 
town is writ large in the universal fondness for 
picnics, circuses, parades, church socials, conven¬ 
tions, and secret societies. The small town mind 
emerges in the amazing popularity of the moving 
picture, essentially a small town amusement; in 
the Ford, the small townsman’s means of locomo¬ 
tion; in revivals, the small town type of religion; 
in Fundamentalism, small town theology; and in 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 221 

the enthusiastic reception of Mr. Bryan’s denun¬ 
ciation of evolution which fits the small town idea 
of science. Allusion has been made to the fact 
that the Elan is essentially a small town move¬ 
ment. It is such because the stronghold of the 
hundreds of secret lodges in this country is to be 
found in the small town. Every town and many 
villages have their lodge of the Odd Fellows, the 
Masons, the Loyal Order of the Moose, or the 
Elks. The smaller cities of the Southwest, which 
can seldom boast of a decent church or school 
building, not to mention a considerable library or 
an art gallery, are often the possessors of mag¬ 
nificent Masonic temples costing hundreds of 
thousands. It is worth while asking why the 
secret society plays such an important role in 
small town life, thereby becoming an integral 
part of the social fabric of the nation. 

Life in the small town, as portrayed for us in 
Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, has lost the adven¬ 
turousness, the creative individual initiative of 
pioneer days, and has become sicklied over with 
the deadly monotony of a conventionalized democ¬ 
racy. The democratic emphasis upon equality, 
publicity, and like-mindedness leaves whole phases 
of man’s nature to starve. The drab humdrum of 
conventional democracy has no place for the mys- 


222 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


tery men crave. It is more or less inimical to 
those personal intimacies to be had only within 
the exclusive circle of a favored group. It is ut¬ 
terly devoid of the pomp and circumstance or the 
imaginative appeal of rank and noble blood. With 
the very best of intentions democracy tends to 
magnify mediocrity. Its god is the ‘ i average 
man.” 

Those secret societies whose emphasis is pri¬ 
marily social, have arisen to meet these deficien¬ 
cies of conventional democracy so strongly in evi¬ 
dence in the small town. They offer an element 
of mystery lacking in the prosaic round of small 
town life. The hocus-pocus of a secret ritual in¬ 
troduces the dramatic note. Its absurdities are 
lost upon the individual who feels that through 
it he escapes into an Invisible Empire whose 
secret ramifications, reach to the utmost bounds 
of the nation. High-flown titles and the mystic 
alliterative appeal of grotesque neologisms such 
as “Klud,” “Klokard,” “Klexter,” “Kleagle,” 
“Kloran,” “Klavern,” and the like tickle the 
imagination and fascinate by their strangeness. 
Gorgeous costumes provide color and variety. 
The pomp of a parade along streets lined with 
gaping villagers suggests a feeling of social im¬ 
portance and flatters the pride of the small town 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 223 

mind. The fraternal convention with its march¬ 
ings, its convivialities, its effusions of post¬ 
prandial wit, its good fellowship and larger social 
contacts, furnishes a most grateful means of es¬ 
cape from the tyranny of business and the deadly 
monotony of small town life, providing something 
like an Aristotelian katharsis of the starved emo¬ 
tions, when it does not degenerate, as is sometimes 
the case, into a debauch. 

In the fraternal orders in which the social note 
predominates secrecy plays a most important role. 
From the Masons, with their historic traditions 
and their various subdivisions, down to the most 
insignificant local order, all alike seek to intrigue 
the imagination of the small town dweller with 
their mystery. Secrecy is an inherent and indis¬ 
pensable part of their equipment, for without se¬ 
crecy it would be vain to seek to escape the light 
of the drab and commonplace democratic day. 
The bar of secrecy makes possible a charmed land 
of mystery and imagination and intimate friend¬ 
ships. It is a make-believe land to be sure, often 
a cheap and tawdry substitute even for the unin¬ 
teresting realities of small town existence. But 
the barrier of secrecy gives to this land of make- 
believe a fascinating charm. It even lends to it in 
the minds of the initiated as well as of the 


224 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

“aliens,” as the Klan calls outsiders, a sort of 
supernal reality. Whatever takes place within 
this veil of secrecy assumes a unique importance. 
It makes friendships more genuine, wit more 
spontaneous, laughter more contagious. The 
moral banalities of the ritual, the absurd and ri¬ 
diculous nomenclature of officers or the childish 
mummeries of the secret paraphernalia become 
interesting, dignified, even awe-inspiring. There 
still remains in all of us, despite “the wreckful 
siege of battling days,” something of childhood’s 
fondness for the wonderful land of make-believe. 

Obviously the secrecy of the fraternal order 
whose chief emphasis is upon the social side is 
in no wise incompatible with civic duties and a 
healthful social order. Secrecy merely serves to 
heighten the social function of these societies by 
providing a valuable means of escape from do¬ 
mestic and business drudgery. The secret fra¬ 
ternal order has arisen to meet very real needs of 
American life. It is the product of that natural 
tendency of men, remarked by DeTocqueville, to 
“set up, close by the great political community, 
small private circles” which shall minister to the 
needs of a human nature neglected and starved by 
a conventional democratic society. 

In the light of the foregoing sketch it is perhaps 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 


225 


possible to classify secret societies into three 
groups according to the roles they ascribe to 
secrecy. In the first group would fall the fraternal 
beneficiary societies so popular among the wage¬ 
earning class. Secrecy in this group is merely a 
protective measure. A second group would include 
those large fraternal orders whose membership is 
drawn from the well-to-do middle class. In this 
group secrecy serves as a means of lending variety 
and interest to our poverty-stricken American life. 
To these two types of societies whose use of se¬ 
crecy is harmless and therefore tolerated by public 
sentiment must be added a third group, the mili¬ 
tant oath-bound societies who make use of secrecy 
in the performance of acts or the carrying out of 
programs the scope of which is not limited to the 
membership of the secret order but affects di¬ 
rectly the welfare of society as a whole. The old 
Ku Klux Klan of Reconstruction days, organized 
to resist the tyranny of carpet-bag rule, the Vehm- 
gerichte of Westphalia that arose in the Middle 
Ages to check the anarchy threatened by the disso¬ 
lution of the strong government of Charlemagne, 
the Carbonarii of Naples who sought to throw off 
the yoke of Napoleon, the Mafia of southern Italy 
organized to resist the police and to protect the 
smugglers, the Clan-na-Gael, an Irish secret so- 


226 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


ciety organized to resist English tyranny and per¬ 
petuated to some extent in the lawless Molly Ma¬ 
guires of the Pennsylvania coal mines—all these 
are illustrations of the militant, oath-bound, se¬ 
cret society which makes use of secrecy to carry 
out policies of vital interest to society as a whole. 
It is a matter of some importance, therefore, to de¬ 
termine to which of these three groups the mod¬ 
ern Ku Klux Klan belongs. 

m 

Owing primarily to the planless opportunism 
that has characterized the Klan from the very be¬ 
ginning we find it strikingly inconsistent in this 
matter of secrecy. Reference has already been 
made to the question put to the official head of the 
Klan, Emperor W. J. Simmons, by Representative 
Fess, a member of the committee appointed by 
Congress to investigate the Klan, “Is the purpose 
of this order anything like that of the Invisible 
Empire in Civil War times V 9 to which Emperor 
Simmons replied, “No, sir; we have no conditions 
existing now that would justify such a modus 
operandi. This is purely a fraternal and patrio¬ 
tic organization.’’ This statement is patently at 
variance with other public utterances of Emperor 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 227 

Simmons and with the inferences to be drawn from 
the official Klan literature. 

Later the following colloquy took place between 
Emperor Simmons and Mr. Campbell, chairman of 
the investigating committee. Mr. Campbell: i ‘ The 
fact, however, is that the mask worn by the Klans- 
man has been used to conceal those who have had 
any purpose to serve, good or bad, and that they 
have been able to conceal their identity from the 
public does not strike you as being a question that 
should have your attention as Imperial Wizard 
of the Invisible Empire, or that you should go into 
the question of whether or not it would promote 
the welfare of the Invisible Empire to remove the 
mask?” (Congressional English is often fear¬ 
fully and wonderfully made. The writer tran¬ 
scribes it as it stands in the record.) Mr. Sim¬ 
mons: “I will state that there is a possible ground 
there, just as there are a good many other things 
that we now have under consideration in the de¬ 
velopment of this infant organization. ...” Mr. 
Campbell: “Men of such high and noble purposes 
as Klansmen should not conceal their names from 
the public or their faces from the public. Do you 
not think that it would be a good thing to let the 
public know who these noble men are?” Mr. 
Simmois: “Yes, sir, certainly; and at the proper 


228 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

time the public is going to know.” Mr. Campbell: 
“When are you planning that the public shall 
know who the Klansmen are?” Mr. Simmons: 
“That is in the development of our work. We are 
simply making the organization. We are perfect¬ 
ing it in its ritualistic casting, and, in a way, we 
are in a state of childhood. The matter of wear¬ 
ing the robe and mask is nothing more or less 
than a memorial, or it is done for monumental 
purposes.” This was spoken October 17th, 1921. 
Over two years have elapsed and the mask has not 
been removed. 

There is a very real reason why the Klan has 
not discarded its mask and robe. They are abso¬ 
lutely necessary for the carrying out of the pro¬ 
gram the Klan has set for itself. This fact is 
abundantly recognized by the Klan leaders them¬ 
selves. In a contribution to Klan literature by 
Rev. Ben Bogard, a Baptist minister of Little 
Rock, Arkansas, who “has been a member of the 
K. K. K. from its beginning in Arkansas” and 
who “defies any one to deny his statements,” this 
representative of the gospel of peace on earth and 
good will among men says, ‘ ‘ Every Klansman is a 
sworn detective. He is instructed to keep both 
eyes open and his mouth shut.” Rev. Bogard in¬ 
forms us, “The number of the Klan is not being 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 229 

accurately passed out to the public for the reason 
that its membership is secret and its number is 
secret and you are possibly associated every day 
with some Klansman who will never tell you he is 
a member. The secrecy of the order is its chief 
power [italics are the writer’s]. If the member¬ 
ship were known it would be like publishing to the 
world who the detectives are. Any thief could go 
around a known detective.” 

Here is a plain statement that the Klan is pri¬ 
marily a militant order and that secrecy is indis¬ 
pensable to the carrying out of its aims. Just as 
detective bureaus are organized to operate in se¬ 
cret against the criminals of the community, so 
the Klan is a self-constituted detective society in 
the community. There is this fundamental differ¬ 
ence, however; detectives, whether employed by 
the state, or private individuals, are always sub¬ 
ject to the control of the constituted authorities 
of the community. The IHan, however, is a law 
unto itself. It exerts its detective function apart 
from any check save the judgment of its members. 
We have here, obviously, a situation fraught with 
danger to the community. Detectives are under 
constant danger of violating the laws or infring¬ 
ing upon the rights of the individual. They are 
for that reason and because of their methods sel- 


230 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

dom held in the highest respect by the community. 
Many detectives are doubtless valuable public ser¬ 
vants. So long as we have lawless members of 
society we shall in all probability be forced to use 
the methods of the detective to control them. But 
to adopt the methods of the detective in a secret 
oath-bound organization not employed by the 
state or municipality and operating with no other 
restraint than its own sense of what is right is an 
utterly anomalous and dangerous procedure in a 
free country. It is nothing more nor less than the 
proposal to adopt principles and methods within 
a peaceful and law-abiding community that are 
justifiable only in wartime or when we are forced 
to deal with individuals or groups that are avow¬ 
edly lawless. Where such methods are used to 
any great extent by a large organization such as 
the Klan there is practically no limit to the ex¬ 
tent to which it may become a source of demorali¬ 
zation in the community. 

iv 

That the Klan has exerted a demoralizing influ¬ 
ence upon community and national life by virtue 
of its secret methods there can not be the slightest 
doubt. The evidence in support of this statement 


231 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 

is simply overwhelming. In every city or com¬ 
munity where the Klan is a force to be reckoned 
with one finds “leading citizens” who will express 
frankly in private their opposition to the Klan 
but who close these interviews almost invariably 
with the words, “I prefer not to be quoted in this 
matter.” A correspondent from Raleigh, North 
Carolina, states that while the Klan was con¬ 
demned by the governor and stringent bills were 
introduced against it in the Senate and the House, 
“yet the acts finally passed were weak and in¬ 
effective. Many members seemed to fear the in¬ 
calculable influence of the unknown members of 
the secret order among their constituents. A 
citizen of Atlanta states, “I find that among those 
men I know well and with whom I am at liberty 
to talk, the organization is a good deal of a joke. 
They are willing to laugh about it in private, but 
to be perfectly frank about it most of us would 
rather keep our mouths shut publicly.” An edu¬ 
cator in Alabama says, “I am bitterly opposed 
to the idea of the secrecy of the Klan and con¬ 
sider it cowardly to go around masked and 
ashamed to own its identity. ... I think that 
many hold the same views as I do but because of 
its secrecy they do not care to be too outspoken 
for fear of consequences in a business way.” A 


232 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


correspondent from Denver, Colorado, writes that 
while two years ago the general attitude of the 
community was that of opposition to the Klan, 
“To-day it is doubtful. The Klan propaganda is 
secret and insidious. People begin to be cau¬ 
tious in expressing themselves—in itself a bad 
sign as the Klan is itself a moral issue.” 

Here is a matter of serious concern for all pa¬ 
triotic citizens who wish well for their community, 
their state, or their country. When we have a 
great movement under way, claiming as its pur¬ 
pose the punishment of the criminal, the main¬ 
tenance of pure Americanism, the preservation 
of the sanctity of womanhood and a general cen¬ 
sorship over the morals of the community and the 
nation, and when the leading men of the com¬ 
munity representing its best brains and finest cul¬ 
ture, owing to the secret and militant methods of 
this movement, dare not come out and say what 
they think about it, we have something very 
closely approximating terrorism. To be sure, the 
Klan strives for just this psychological effect 
upon the community. There are doubtless mem¬ 
bers of the order who will be pleased when they 
read the statements above. Such utterances are a 
tribute to the Klansman’s power. They flatter 
his pride. But what is the price paid for this 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 


233 


paralyzing of healthful public sentiment through 
intimidation? It engenders a moral atmosphere 
thoroughly inimical to free democratic institu¬ 
tions. 

It is a hard saying and yet true that the Klan 
is a breeder of cowards. It breeds cowards both 
inside and outside the Klan. It breeds cowards 
outside the Klan because it takes courage 
to fight an antagonist who strikes in the dark. It 
breeds cowards within the Klan because it offers 
effective concealment for the small and spiteful 
spirit. It places a premium upon the bully and the 
sneak. President Weaver of Mercer University, 
Georgia, well says: 4 ‘Those who desire to improve 
the conduct of their fellow men, wearing the 
ghostly garb of the Ku Klux Klan, using the whip 
or tar and feathers, will enjoy for a time the ex¬ 
ultation which the underman can not conceal 
when for a brief period he feels himself to be the 
possessor of power and the creator of fear.” 
There is an element of this type of character in 
every one of us. It is particularly strong in the 
man of narrow outlook on life who chafes under 
a sense of his own insignificance and grasps 
eagerly at the mask and robe as a means of grati¬ 
fying wounded pride or cowardly spite. For 
the Klan, in spite of its lofty claims and its best 


234 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


intentions, places in the position of power and 
initiative in the community the inferior man of 
limited intelligence, with strong prejudices, with 
fixed and unreasoning convictions upon politics, 
religion, or conventional morals. The Klan 
makes him supreme because it provides him with 
a mask, with cow-hide and tar-pot and the mys¬ 
terious arm of an Invisible Empire, as a means 
of enforcing his own will and of closing the 
mouths of the real leaders of the community. The 
Klan in this sense is perhaps the most striking 
example this generation has furnished of the 
tyranny of the conventionally patriotic, often well- 
meaning but small-minded, mediocre man. 

Wherever the Klan has become a power in a 
community its secret and militant methods have 
eaten like an acid into the fabric of society, dis¬ 
integrating loyalties, setting man against man, 
and paralyzing social and civic enthusiasms. Ref¬ 
erence has been made to the situation, created by 
the Klan in the larger cities of Oregon, such as 
Portland and Astoria. The chambers of com¬ 
merce lost members and influence because of dis¬ 
sensions introduced by the Klan. In other com¬ 
munities the American Legion was torn by fac¬ 
tional fights centering around the Klan. The is¬ 
sue of the Klan introduced an atmosphere of sus- 


235 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 

picion and distrust even into the great fraternal 
societies such as the Masons and the Odd Fellows. 
Most lamentable of all was the effect of the Klan 
upon the numerous small local neighborhood 
clubs where groups gathered in the homes for so¬ 
cial and civic purposes with no thought of reli¬ 
gious or other differences. The secret and mili¬ 
tant methods of the Klan created an atmosphere 
of restraint and antagonism, thus described by a 
close observer: “Invariably the time would come 
when the hostess of the evening would receive the 
regrets of one or two members who had never 
before absented themselves. Over those who did 
assemble would hang a pall of forced gaiety, punc¬ 
tuated by embarrassing gaps in the customary 
flow of bantering conversation. The luncheon or 
supper hour would be rushed a trifle, in hopes of 
relieving the strained atmosphere. Throughout 
the meal the host and hostess would exert them¬ 
selves to restore the lost gaiety, without avail. 
The once harmonious group seemed now to be a 
collection of misfits—the congeniality was gone. 
Over their coffee and cigars the men talked in 
monosyllables of the weather and other common¬ 
place topics. Uppermost in the mind of each was 
a vital subject of public concern, the Ku Klux 
Klan, but it was never mentioned. Already sus- 


236 THE KU KLUX KLAN 

picion and distrust were eating into the commu¬ 
nity.” 

Ex-Senator LeRoy Percy of Greenville, Missis¬ 
sippi, in a remarkable address delivered April 23, 
1923, to his fellow townsmen, an address that 
should be read by all Americans where the Klan 
is an issue, says: “This thing has come into our 
midst, parting friends, sowing discord, dissen¬ 
sion, and hatred where there was gentleness and 
love and friendship; disrupting churches, threat¬ 
ening civic societies, destroying the spirit of co¬ 
operation, and making man look with suspicion on 
man and wonder whether his neighbor is his 
friend or his secret enemy. You walk the street 
and you feel that you are standing among hostile 
people. Standing less than twelve months from 
the time when we gathered on this platform to¬ 
gether, and looking back through a mist of hate 
that has arisen from this Klan business, like 
miasma from a morass, it is hard to visualize the 
town as it was a year ago, it is hard to call it 
back.” All good men and true owe ex-Senator 
Percy and others like him a vast debt of gratitude 
that they are courageous and patriotic enough to 
stand up, at the risk often of personal danger, 
and condemn this un-American monstrosity. 

Thanks to the mask and robe, thousands of pa- 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 237 

triotic and well-intentioned Americans are in¬ 
duced to engage in secret methods which amount 
to a complete denial of the principles of true 
Americanism. They are made to stultify them¬ 
selves. In section four of his oath of allegiance, 
as given in, the Kloran, the Klansman is made to 
say, “I swear that I will most zealously and val¬ 
iantly shield and preserve by any and all means 
and methods the sacred constitutional rights and 
privileges of free public schools, free speech, free 
press, separation of church and state, liberty, 
white supremacy, just laws, and the pursuit of 
happiness against any encroachments of any na¬ 
ture by any person or persons, political party or 
parties, religious sect or people, native, natural¬ 
ized or foreign, of any race, color, creed, lineage 
or tongue whatsoever.” Surely language could 
go no further in superlative and tautological as¬ 
severation of loyalty to free American institutions. 
This secret and militant organization proposes by 
its secret methods to defend the u sacred consti¬ 
tutional rights” of free speech, free press, and 
freedom of religious belief! "What could be more 
absurd! The grotesque robes and masks, mys¬ 
terious fiery torches, cow-hides, and tar-pots 
manipulated behind masks, threatening anony¬ 
mous letters, and all similar terrorizing agencies 


238 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


used by this secret oath-bound order to enforce its 
will upon individuals and communities are utterly 
incompatible with the Klansman’s sworn loyalty to 
“sacred Constitutional rights” of Americans. 

Section 2, Article 3 of the Constitution says, 
“The trial of all crimes, except in cases of im¬ 
peachment, shall be by jury.” It is perfectly ob¬ 
vious that this constitutional right of trial by jury 
even in the case of the vilest criminal and the most 
disreputable social outcast is incompatible with 
pronouncements upon the conduct of fellow-citi¬ 
zens made in secret conclave and executed under 
cover of masks or through other extra-legal means. 
“Whenever any association of individuals,” says 
Judge William B. Sheppard, “on their own ac¬ 
count undertake to restrain or prohibit these 
[constitutional] rights by threats or by secret 
demonstrations of power or by other intimidations, 
they are invading the rights of the citizen and vio¬ 
lating the safeguards of constitutional govern¬ 
ment. When they meet together in conclave or 
otherwise for the purpose of depriving any citizen 
of his liberty to exercise his opinion lawfully or 
to do what is not denounced by statute, they are 
invading the rights of such citizens and depriving 
him of a privilege guaranteed by the Constitu¬ 
tion. . . . Any person engaged in a conspiracy to 


SECRECY AND CITIZENSHIP 239 

deprive one of his constitutional rights may be 
prosecuted in a federal court.” 

In the light of the foregoing analysis the con¬ 
clusion is inevitable that the modern Ku Klux 
Klan, like its historic predecessor, the old Klan, 
belongs in the third group of anti-social secret so¬ 
cieties. That is to say, the facts indicate that the 
modern Klan’s secret methods are thoroughly un- 
American and dangerous and therefore merit the 
condemnation of all good citizens. The Klan, 
however, steadily refuses to unmask. It insists 
strenuously that the mask and robe are absolutely 
necessary not only for the execution of the Klan’s 
aims but also for its very existence. On the 
Klan’s own showing, therefore, it has to face the 
alternatives either of discarding the mask and 
perishing through the loss of the one thing that 
gives it significance or of clinging to the mask 
and secret militant methods, thereby giving rise 
to vigorous moral condemnation that must in time 
prove to be the Klan’s undoing. This conclusion, 
it must be confessed, places the Klan in a rather 
unpleasant predicament. To make its secrecy 
harmless at the price of social ineptitude or to re¬ 
tain its present secret anti-social methods at the 
price of moral condemnation and elimination are 
not pleasant alternatives. These alternatives in- 


240 


THE KU KLUX KLAN 


evitably suggest the query, which doubtless the 
reader has already put to himself, whether the 
Klan has not been a huge mistake. The uniform 
opinion of the best element in every community is 
that the Klan has never had any real justification 
for its existence. It has flourished by creating 
false issues, by magnifying hates and prejudices 
or by exploiting misguided loyalties. It can not 
point to a single great constructive movement 
which it has set on foot. Men do not gather grapes 
of thorns nor figs of thistles. 


INDEX 


American Federation of Labor, 
resolution with regard to the 
Klan, 97. 

American Protective Associa¬ 
tion, and Nativism, 131; its 
methods of propaganda, 138; 
forerunner of the Klan, 
166 ff. 

American Unity League, 159. 

Americanism, “one hundred 
percent,” meaning of, 126; 
definitions of, 144 ff. 

Andrews, President, 137. 

Anti-Catholicism, see Ch. VI. 
Simmons quoted on, 28; in 
the Middle West, 34; in Ore¬ 
gon, 45 ff.; and the Scotch- 
Irish, 100; and the post-war 
mind, 124 ff.; sources of, 
among Klansmen, 169 f.; how 
far justifiable, 202 ff. 

Baker, Ray Stannard, 71. 

Beach, H. A, 140. 

Berkson, I. B., 149. 

“Birth of a Nation,” effects 
of, 71. 

Bismarck, 189. 

Bliss, Cornelius, 137. 

Bogard, Rev. Ben, 228. 

Book, Rev. J. W., 214. 

Brosnahan, Rev. T., 198. 

Bryan, W. J., 21, 101, 103, 
105, 115, 220. 

Burleson, Postmaster-General, 

6 . 

“Cahenslyism,” 182. 

Calvin, John, 20. 

Campbell, Chairman of House 
Rules Committee, 28, 227. 


Carbonarii, 225. 

Carpenter, Deacon Philo, 210. 

Carroll, David, 171. 

Catholic Americans, attitude 
towards the Klan, 159; fric¬ 
tion with Protestants due to 
Klan, 160 f.; imperialistic 
ambitions of, 164 f.; original 
status of, 172 f.; rise of 
“Americanism” among, 177 
f.; “Cahenslyism” and, 182; 
suppression of “American¬ 
ism” by Pope Leo XIII, 
185 f.; injustice of the Klan 
towards, 187 f.; theocratic 
autocracy of papacy and, 
191 f.; dual sovereignty of 
church and state and, 203 f. 

Catholic World , the, 177. 

Chicago Defender, the, 34. 

Clan-na-Gael, 225. 

Clarke, E. Y., 7, 8, 12, 13, 16, 
18, 22, 41, 132. 

Clement XII, 213. 

Cleveland, Grover, 137. 

Commercialism, in the Klan, 8. 

Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer-Sun, 
14. 

Corbin, John, 150. 

Daily Journal of Commerce, 
the, 59. 

Dallas News, the, 14. 

Darwin, Charles, 114, 115. 

Desmond, Humphrey J., 161. 

DeTocqueville, 172, 207. 

Dickson, Harris, 56. 

Duffus, R. L., 32. 

Evolution, 105. 


242 


INDEX 


Farm Bureau Federation, 98. 
Farmers, not members of the 
Klan, 98 f. 

Fear, trait of post-war mind 
exploited by the Klan, 122. 
Fess, Representative, 22, 226. 
Field, Cyrus W., 137. 

Fiery Torch , the, 30. 

Fillmore, Millard, 209. 
Fitzsirpmons, Thomas, 171. 
Ford, Henry, 125. 

Forrest, Grand Wizard, 66. 
Foster, Melville, 102. 

Frank, Leo, 42. 

Freedmen’s Bureau, 56. 
Freudianism, 33, 87. 

Fry, Captain, 16. 
Fundamentalism, 21, 51, 101, 
105. 

Galveston News, the, 14. 
Gibbons, Cardinal, 139, 164, 
179, 183, 187, 196, 200, 201, 
202 . 

Gifford, Fred. L., 44. 

Grant, Madison, 147. 

Grant, President, 66. 

Gould, Chas. W., 147. 

Griffith, David W., 71. 

Hale, Matthew, 137. 

Hayes, Rutherford B., 137. 
Hecker, Father, 177 ff., 191. 
Hitchcock, Henry, 137. 

Hough, Emerson, 44. 

Houston Chronicle, the, 102. 
Houtin, L’Am6ricanisme, 181, 
186. 

Inge, Dean, quoted, 189 ff. 
Immigration, and Nativism, 
129 f.; effect of, on native 
American stock, 140 ff. 
Intolerance, and education, 
50 f. 

Ireland, Archbishop, 177 f., 
191. 

Jay, John, 137. 

Jeanmard, Rev. Jules B., 160. 


Jews, attitude of Klan to¬ 
wards, 20, 110; and post¬ 
war mind, 125; boycotted 
by the Klan, 168. 

Jones, Rev. Ashby, 102. 

Jordan, President, 137. 

Junior Order of United Me¬ 
chanics, 102. 

Keane, Archbishop, 178, 184, 
191. 

Klan, the old, relations to the 
modern Klan, see Ch. Ill; 
Southern attitude towards, 
54; Randolph Shotwell on 
causes of, 56 ff.; organiza¬ 
tion of, 62f.; weaknesses of, 
65 f.; intimidation of Ne¬ 
groes, 73 ff.; persistence of 
traditions of, 88 ff.; the mod¬ 
ern, origin of, 4 f.; expan¬ 
sion of, 7, 31; and New 
York World, 10 ff.; ritual 
of, 19 ff.; congressional in¬ 
vestigations of, 20 ff.; rela¬ 
tions _of official and loeal 
'Klans,' 23, 29 ff., 90; and 
law enforcement, 24; and 
white supremacy, 27; mem¬ 
bership of, 32 f., 96 ff.; atti¬ 
tudes towards, 33 ff.; weak 
in large cities, 34; estimate 
of influence of, 32_f v __3fli 
motives for joining, ~ 38 f.; 
change in Original purpose of, 
39 ff.; sources of strength, 
42; political activities in 
Oregon, 45 ff.; historical 
background, 53; encourages 
social discord, 54. 230 ff.; 
why change of attitude to¬ 
wards in North, 69 f.; imi¬ 
tation of old Klan, 73 f.; op¬ 
posed by intelligent mem¬ 
bers of communities, 91 f., 
102 f., 155 f.; and old 

American stpck, 128 ff.; 
claims to leadership exam^ 
iijpd,~~T54^r 

Klorah'-thspl9 ff., 237. 



INDEX 243 


Knights of Columbus, 139, 217. 

Know-Nothings, the, 42, 45, 
46, 53, 132 ff., 143, 161, 176. 

Labor, organized, not in sym¬ 
pathy with the Klan, 96 ff. 

Ladies of the Invisible Empire, 
46 f. 

League of Nations, 89, 123. 

Lee, Thomas Sims, 171. 

Lewis, Sinclair, 104, 221. 

Leo XIII, 139, 183, 184 f., 191, 
197. 

Like-mindedness and the Klan, 
109. 

Lippmann, Walter H., 116. 

Logan, Judge, 60. 

Mafia, 225. 

Malthusianism, 142. 

Masons, the, 47, 147. 

McDougall, William, 147. 

Mer Rouge, 36, 90, 160. 

Middle Class, the, r6le in a de¬ 
mocracy, 152 ff.; and the 
Klan, 154 f. 

Molly Maguires, the, 226. 

Monk, Maria, 167. 

Morehouse Klan, the, 40. 

Morgan, J. P., 137. 

Morgan, Levi P., 137. 

Morgan, William, 208. 

Morgan, William Fellowes, 137. 

National League for the Pro¬ 
tection of American Institu¬ 
tions, 131, 138. 

Native American Stock, and 
the Klan, 128; discriminated 
against, 140 f.; alleged supe¬ 
riority, 145 ff.; and the mid¬ 
dle class, 151 ff. 

Nativism, movement, 128 ff.; 
and the Klan, 132; claims 
of, 143 ff. 

Negro, excluded from the Klan, 
96; opposes Klan politically, 
34; soldiery' and the Klan, 
40; and the Union League, 
57; and “one hundred per¬ 


cent Americanism,” 112; 
whites’ fear of, 122. 

New Orleans Times Picayune, 
14. 

Nicholson, Meredith, 34. 

Oath of the Klan, 83 ff. 

Oberholtzer, History of the 
United States Since the 
Civil War, 67. 

O’Gorman, Thomas, 171. 

O’Hara, Rev. Edwin V., 50. 

Oklahoman, the, 14. 

Olcott, Governor, 46. 

Oregon, story of spread of 
Klan in, 43 f. 

Outrages, attributed to the 
Klan, 9, 81. 

Parades, effective use of, by 
Klan, 75, 106. 

Patriotic Sons of America, 
130. 

Paulists, the, 177 f. 

Peckham, Judge, 137. 

Percy, Ex-Senator LeRoy, 92, 
102, 336. 

Phillips, Wendell, 209. 

Pierce, Walter N., 46. 

Plato, allegory of the cave, 
113. 

Purity of womanhood, and the 
Klan, 86 f. 

Renan, 181. 

Ridley, Rev. Caleb, 101. 

Rogers, President, 137. 

Rose, Mrs. S. E. F., 54, 88. 

Royal Riders of the Red Robe, 
46 f. 

Satolli, Monsignor, 164. 

Searchlight, the, 30. 

Sergeant Dalton’s Weekly, 30. 

Scotch-Irish, the, 99 ff. 

Secrecy, see Ch. VII; of the 
Klan a challenge, 83 f.; in¬ 
consistency of Klan as to, 
226 f.; indispensable to Klan 


244 


INDEX 


aims, 228 f.; demoralizing ef¬ 
fect on community, 230 f. 

Simmons, W. J., 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 
11, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22 ff., 39, 
68, 72, 84, 101, 225, 227, 228. 

Shand, Robert W., 91. 

Sheppard, Judge William B., 
238 

Sherman, John, 54, 69. 

Shotwell, Randolph, 56, 73, 87. 

Small town, psychology of, 
104 ff. 

Societies, secret, why discour¬ 
aged at first, 208 f.; Protes¬ 
tant attitude towards, 210 f.; 
Catholic hostility to, 213 f.; 
social significance of, 217 ff.; 
types of, 225. 

South-West, characteristics of, 
104 ff. 

Spalding, Bishop, 165, 179, 180, 
183, 188. 

Stereotypes, mental, 113 ff. 

Stoddard, Rev. J. P., 209. 

Stoddard, Lothrop, 147. 

Strong, William, 137. 

Sumner, Charles, 70. 

Tyler, Mrs. Elizabeth, 7, 8, 12, 
18, 22, 41. 

Tannenbaum, Frank' 86. 


Tolerance , anti-Klan organ, 
159. 

Tolerance, religious, meaning 
for Protestant and Catholic, 
196 f. 

Union League, the, 56, 60 f., 78. 

United Daughters of the Con¬ 
federacy, 54, 88. 

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 137. 

Vehmgerichte, 225 

Voltaire, 62, 118, 181. 

Walker, General Francis, 137. 

War, psychological effects of, 
120 f. 

, Watson, Thomas, 41, 103. 

• White supremacy, meaning of, 
27. 

Weaver, President, 233. 

Weed, Thurlow, 209. 

Weekly Times Union, the, 91, 
92. 

Wilson, Woodrow, 89, 123. 

Wirt, William, 209. 

World, the New York, and the 
Klan, 10 ff. 

Zangwill, the “Melting Pot,” 
148. 











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